Changing the reproducibility rulebook
It pays to know when taking shortcuts is acceptable, and which it’s safe to take
Ask any circle of chemists about the major problems in the field today, and it won’t take long for reproducibility to come up. Although not quite so pronounced as the crisis in fields like psychology, every synthetic chemist has encountered literature procedures they are unable to match.
However, there can also be a mismatch between the original researcher’s expectations, and those following them. The chemist following a literature procedure is unlikely to try it for the same reason as it was originally published. There is value to the followers in knowing where it might be possible to sacrifice a little bit of yield for a significant saving in time, for example.