About

I’m an Assistant Professor at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham (2016-present). My research interests include human rights, foreign direct investment, corruption and slavery.

I’m involved in a number of initiatives to promote research transparency. I’m an ambassador at the Center for Open Science (COS) and a catalyst at the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS).

Before working at Nottingham, I taught statistics for social scientists at the Social Sciences Research Methods Centre, University of Cambridge (2014- 2016). To integrate replication practice into teaching at Cambridge, I developed the Cambridge Replication Workshop. In 8 weeks, graduate students replicated a paper and subsequently published it.

I completed my PhD in Politics and International Studies at the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge in 2014.

I tweet @polscireplicate I have a personal webpage.

Why I started this blog

I started my blog in January 2013 because I was frustrated with the state of reproducibility in the social sciences:

• many journals did not have replication policies
• many authors did not keep replication data files on their computers to send them out on request
• many authors did not keep clearly commented R code or STATA .do files for replication purposes
• some refused to send the data upon request

My wish list

I would like to see the following changes in the social sciences:

• All journals should require that authors upload the data sets and software code for all models used upon acceptance of their article.
• Authors should keep detailed records about data sets, models, R code and .do files for all results presented in the full text, footnotes and appendix.
• Authors should not just ‘promise’ to send data ‘on request’, but do so.
• There should be an open source Journal of Social Science Replication to boost replications not only for learning purposes but also as a valuable contribution to the field.

My academic articles about reproducibility

Janz, N. “Bringing the Gold Standard Into the Class Room: Replication in University Teaching,” International Studies Perspectives, Article first published online: 9 MAR 2015. DOI: 10.1111/insp.12104.

Gleditsch, N.P. & Janz, N. “Replication in International Relations.” International Studies Perspectives. Article first published online: 25 February 2016. DOI: 10.1093/isp/ekv003.

Some media & blog contributions

Joseph K. Young and Nicole Janz (2015) What Social Science Can Learn From the LaCour Scandal, The Chronicle of Higher Education. June 3, 2015.

Janz, Nicole (2015) Is withholding your data simply bad science, or should it fall under scientific misconduct? LSE Impact Blog. July 3, 2015.

Nicole Janz, Seth Werfel, and Stephanie Wykstra (2014) Replication in political science graduate courses: an untapped resource?Monkey Cage/The Washington Post. February 12, 2014.

Alex Sutherland and Nicole Janz. (2013) Social science and replication 11 December, 2013.

Some videos

Contact

Please contact me via email (nicolejanz at gmail com) or twitter (@polscireplicate) if you have questions about the blog, if you would like to write a guest post, or if you would like to share ideas about reproducibility.