# A replication status badge on every cancer paper, visible in PubMed

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-replication-status-badge/  
OnCo record `idea-tr2-replication-status-badge` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

When you look up a paper, you should immediately see whether anyone has tried to repeat it and whether they succeeded.

## Summary

Replication status is scattered across follow-up papers, preprints and comments (PubPeer). A curated, structured layer linking each paper to registered replication attempts and their outcomes (replicated, partially, failed, not attempted), displayed alongside abstracts in PubMed and Europe PMC via existing annotation mechanisms, would make reproducibility visible at the point of reading and reward replicators with attribution.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Papers with a displayed 'failed replication' status will see a decline in uncritical citation (citing as established fact) of at least a third within two years.
- Rationale: Retracted papers continue to be cited because the status is not visible where readers look; the same fix applies to replication.
- Proposed test: Annotate 1,000 high-impact cancer papers; deploy the badge via Europe PMC annotations; analyse citation context before and after.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: data

## Sources

- PubPeer: https://pubpeer.com/

## Connected records

- collections: [PubMed & Europe PMC](https://onco.cc/collections/pubmed-europepmc/)
- ideas: [Alert guidelines and trials when a paper they rely on is retracted](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-retraction-propagation/), [Bounties for documented failed replications of high-impact findings](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-replication-bounties/), [Every cancer biology PhD begins with a funded replication of a published finding](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-phd-replication-year/)
- bottlenecks: [Knowledge reaches practice too slowly](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-knowledge-diffusion/), [Preclinical results do not reproduce](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-reproducibility/)

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