Research Transparency in Brazil – creating impact step by step

I’ve recently finished a project with my Brazilian collaborator Dalson Figueiredo on fostering transparency in research and government, funded by the British Academy/Newton Fund and supported by the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS). The main purpose of our project was to foster transparency in scholarly research and in Brazilian government institutions by giving workshops and running a reproducible research project on corruption convictions. Here is what I take away from this project.

Replication and transparency in political science – have we made any progress?

When a range of top political science journals signed a statement to enforce transparency in 2014 (JETS statement), there was an immediate backlash by qualitative researchers. Hundreds of scholars signed a petition against strict transparency rules asking for clarification. Then the LaCour scandal happened, where a political scientist fabricated a study and pretended to withhold his data because of confidentially. Another wake-up call. Where is the debate in political science now? 

Ethics, Scandals and Self-Correction: My Predictions for Reproducibility in 2018

What’s going to happen in the reproducibility world in 2018? What are the new trends to push transparency, especially in the social sciences? And most importantly, what’s the next big challenge to be tackled? Here are my top predictions, collected with the help of reproducibility folks on twitter.

Guest post: Should researchers committed to and promoting reproducible research be additionally rewarded? by Marta Teperek

Doing reproducible research and advocating for reproducibility involves extra time and resources. This puts researchers at a competitive disadvantage. But should they ask for additional rewards for their engagement? A guest post by Marta Teperek.

What has reproducibility promotion done for me?

Why should I promote reproducibility? Doesn’t this distract me from my research? Here are four tangible benefits that show how being a data champion has helped my academic career.

Balancing Ethics and Transparency (part II): publishing sensitive data

More and more funders and journals require data management plans and public access to all types of research data. At the same time, many researchers struggle to balance transparency against legal and ethical obligations. Following on part I of this blog post, what are some simple guidelines on how to share sensitive data?

Balancing Ethics and Transparency (part I)

Many journals and funders have policies requiring research transparency before an article is accepted or a project is supported. At the same time, much of the work in the social sciences relies on sensitive data in surveys or interviews that could endanger privacy or the well-being of human subjects. How can scholars working with sensitive data ensure a degree of transparency that still protects privacy?

Replication in international relations: New research and blog

Nils Petter Gledisch and I just published a guest blog post about replication in international relations at the OUP blog. The blog is based on new research in the field, which we published as a symposium in International Studies Perspectives. We negotiated with OUP that all seven articles will be free access for a few weeks. Make sure to download all the pdfs before they go behind paywall again.

Hi-tech against scientific misconduct + gender bias

The Guardian published a long read piece today on attempts to detect data errors or fabrication on a large scale. Using the app Statcheck by Michele Nuijten, we can now detect automatically if papers may have errors in them. Unfortunately Michele is hardly mentioned in the article and does not become a vital part of the larger story. Gender bias?

Towards a more comprehensive replication standard in political science: reproducible data collection

How can we create reliable and replicable political science data? A recent article in the American Political Science Review focuses on text analysis and suggests ways to make these data sound and reproducible.