Scientific writing requires a certain level of specificity in order to be properly understood and replicated. Science has maintained that in order for a study to be valid, the work must be able to be replicated with the same results. This facet of scientific research puts an incredible amount of importance on the record of how the research in any paper was performed.What factors affect the reproducibility of an experiment? There are many opportunities to document an experiment in a way that it is not reproducible. In order to ensure that an experiment can be repeated, how many factors need to be controlled? As I sought to answer this question I hypothesized that it was most likely an issue of specificity. If a task was detailed explicitly then it would be unlikely to produce different results. The experiment presented was to create a complex multi-panel figure, create the methods, allow for the procedure to be replicated, and to observe the results. In order to gauge the importance of differing factors, certain parts of the figure were carefully controlled and highly detailed, while others were sloppily performed and not nearly as detailed.
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