Reliability
The term reliability can be used to indicate a virtue in a person, a feature of scientific knowledge, or the quality of a product, process, or system. Personal unreliability makes an individual difficult to trust. Unreliability in science calls the scientific enterprise into question. Lack of reliability in technology or engineering undermines utility and public confidence and perhaps commercial success. In all cases the pursuit of reliability is a conscious goal.
Scientific Reliability as Replication
Reliability in science takes its primary form as replicability. Research experiments and research must be performed and then communicated in such a way that they can be replicated by others or the results cannot become part of the edifice of science. Both replicability in principle and actual replication by diverse members of the scientific community are central to the processes of science that make the knowledge produced by science uniquely reliable and able to be trusted both within the community and by nonscientists.
Replication is easier to achieve in some scientific domains than in others, but when it fails, the science is judged unreliable. Historically replication was established first in physics and chemistry, and so in the physical sciences especially lack of replicability can become newsworthy.
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