{"entity":{"id":"idea-tr2-two-lab-rule","kind":"idea","name":"Top journals require an independent lab to reproduce key findings before publication","aka":[],"tldr":"For the biggest claims, journals would require that a second, independent laboratory repeated the central experiment before the paper is accepted.","summary":"Some fields (particle physics with independent detectors, genome-wide association studies with replication cohorts) require independent confirmation as a condition of publication. Cancer biology does not. Top journals could require, for papers whose central claim is a therapeutic effect in a model system, that an independent lab (declared, without shared authorship interests) reproduce the key experiment, with the replication reported in the paper.","asOf":"2026-09-08","links":[{"label":"Bottleneck evidence (Preclinical results do not reproduce): Errington et al., Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology (eLife 2021)","url":"https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71601"}],"tags":[],"related":["idea-tr2-multilab-preclinical","idea-tr2-replication-before-ind"],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":["b-reproducibility"],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"hypothesis":"Papers published under the rule will replicate in subsequent independent studies at more than twice the rate of comparable papers published without it.","rationale":"Genome-wide association studies were plagued by false positives until replication cohorts became mandatory, after which findings became highly reliable.","test":"One high-impact journal adopts the rule for therapeutic claims; track replication outcomes of the first 50 papers against matched papers elsewhere.","maturity":"speculative","actor":"policy","cost":"small","horizonYears":3},"route":"/ideas/idea-tr2-two-lab-rule/","neighbours":{"idea":[{"id":"idea-tr2-replication-before-ind","kind":"idea","name":"Independent replication of the key experiment before first-in-human academic trials","route":"/ideas/idea-tr2-replication-before-ind/"},{"id":"idea-tr2-multilab-preclinical","kind":"idea","name":"Multi-laboratory preclinical trials as the standard for go/no-go decisions","route":"/ideas/idea-tr2-multilab-preclinical/"}],"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-reproducibility","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Preclinical results do not reproduce","route":"/bottlenecks/b-reproducibility/"}]}}