 If you have to say, I used another person's protocol, it's not great. I think that's the best way to do this. And saying, in brief, I used a protocol that we've used before and then you go back to that paper and you say, oh, in brief, I used the same protocol that I used before. And then you keep doing this daisy chain. Oh, in this paper, I used that protocol. In this paper, I used that protocol. Look at my paper from three years ago. It's terrible. It's absolutely a terrible practice. It's one of the worst things because in that paper from 15 years ago, you're using a completely different method. You're using different sets of reagents. So one of the easiest things you can do is you can think of it as a recipe, right? When your grandmother is trying to reproduce somebody else's recipe, the first thing she's going to look at is, hey, what do I have to go out and buy? Right? So here's the list of ingredients. How nice that some journals now ask you for a list of ingredients in a table. But even if they don't ask you for a list of ingredients in a table, that's a really easy thing to do. I got this kind of flower from this store and here's the catalog number. How nice is that, right? Here's the R-I-D for that particular flower. Does it make sense that a scientific recipe is basically, are you using any flower? Are you using the whole wheat flower? Would that make a difference to your recipe? Would that make it more or less reproducible? Yeah. I think you need to know exactly which flower you used to actually reproduce this recipe. So that's the first thing. So you need to look up that list of ingredients. So that's a really easy method of getting this correct. And then the second part is, what exactly did you do? The exact protocol. In step one, I did this. In step two, I did this. When you look at a good recipe site, they will even have pictures. Oh, first, here's a mixing bowl. This is how we did this stuff. There's a journal called Jove, which is the Journal of Visualized Experiments. And they do almost exactly that. They follow you around with the camera and then they say, oh, how did you do this part? How did you do your PCR exactly? How did you do, spin this down? And you can kind of think of this. This method section should be a really critical section. It should not be a throwaway section. It should not be a section that gets put onto the lowliest undergraduate student to write. You should really focus on writing a good, complete method section. Again, with a list of reagents and then with a list of protocols. So here's what we did. Then here's what we did. Have pictures. Have lots of tables and graphs to be able to just show people how to reproduce that study. Because it will help. It will really help to bring together all of the information that somebody else needs. There's a recent study, a recent paper by Lenny Friedman out of the GBSI. He looked at all of the different kinds of places where reproducibility is a problem. He actually put some money figures on those different places. And about half of the irreproducibility problems have something to do with reagents. So if we solve this problem, we'll be solving a good portion of the total reproducibility problems. Another place is a lot of statistical problems. So having a statistical reviewer on your journal is a wonderful thing to do. Asking your statistical colleagues, statistics colleagues to look over the statistics is another great place to really help and make sure that the paper is robust. And then there are others. I mean, are you using enough males and females in the particular study? Again, this is something that you should know from your field. But maybe you're not using enough females in your particular study. When we've looked across all of the different journal articles, people who used mice didn't report whether they were using male or female mice most of the time. When they're using rats, they were only using male rats. When they were using humans, they pretty much divided up half and half. But imagine what that does to drug trials. So now you're basing a clinical trial that's supposed to be for males and females on rat studies that are only talking about and only using males. Is it going to be applicable to half your population? And it turns out many clinical trials fail, right? So why are they failing? Well, let's take a look at our animal subjects. Maybe they're not good enough. Maybe we're not using enough females. Maybe we're not reporting. Maybe we're not blinding. It's one of the easiest things to do. Set up the study ahead of time and blind your investigators. But many people are not randomizing. They're not blinding. And these are kind of very basic methods of making sure that a study is going to be reproducible because they will take out bias.