Reproducibility in plasma agriculture*

In a survey of 1,576 scientists published in Nature,¹⁾ 90% acknowledged reproducibility crisis. The survey reported that over 70% scientists failed to reproduce others' experiments and over 50% failed to reproduce their own results. Experimental results fail reproducibility tests due to several reasons including improper documentation of methodology, considering noise as a positive finding, incomplete experimental variables, data fabrication or bias, publishing  incomplete results and inappropriate statistical analysis.²⁾ In plasma agriculture, reproducibility depends on living things such as seeds, cultivation environment, particle fluxes from plasma, and interactions between them. Based on experimental results, we identified some important factors such as seed coat color and humidity in air to realize good reproducibility.³⁾ Information on such factors should be described in published papers as well as laboratory notebooks.

1)M. Baker, Nat. News 533, 452 (2016). 2) T. Krishna, et al., https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.07.239855. 3) P. Attri, et al., Sci. Rep., 11, 1 (2021).