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.

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Guest Post: The Replication Road – Scientific Detour or Destination? By Nate Breznau

Guest Post: I asked Nate Breznau, an empirical sociologist, to write about his experience replicating published work – the challenges, benefits, and how he got published.

Political science should not stop young researchers from replicating

In a blog post by Jesse Singal at the New York Magazine, one of the students who tried to replicate LaCour‘s findings on gay marriage said that young researchers are often actively discouraged from replicating work.

Guest Post: The Replication Paradox, by Michèle B. Nuijten

Will integrating original studies and published replications always improve the reliability of your results? No! Replication studies suffer from the same publication bias as original studies. In her guest post, Michèle B. Nuijten, who focuses on statistical errors and data manipulation in psychology, presents two solutions to this problem.

Share your replication: Political Science Replication Initiative

Earlier this year, we sent out a survey on replication in political science to the Political Methodology (PolMeth) mailing list. Our survey results, which we wrote up in a post on the Monkey Cage blog, indicated quite a bit of interest in a site to share replication studies.

Guest Post: Leading international studies journal takes replication seriously, by Joseph Young

Transparency and data access – these public goods are crucial principals for science. But why don’t researchers implement them? Political scientist Joseph K. Young discusses incentives for reproducibility, and how he is tracking down old replication data for the leading international studies journal ISQ.

Guest Post: Publishing a replication? Definitely worth repeating, by Chris Hartgerink

Chris Hartgerink is a research master student at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. I invited him to write a guest post about his experience of publishing a replication project. It turns out that, among many other aspects of doing a replication study, one of the main take away points was that a replicator must be reproducible as well. He explains here why it is important to always have a second assessor on all the analysis code before submitting to a journal.

“Replication Bullying:” Who replicates the replicators?

A recent special issue in Social Psychology adds fuel to the debate on data transparency and faulty research. Following an innovative approach, the journal published failed and successful replications instead of typical research papers. A Cambridge scholar, whose paper could not be replicated, now feels treated unfairly by the “data detectives.” She says that the replicators had aimed to “declare the verdict” that they failed to reproduce her results. Her response raises important questions for replications, reproducibility and research transparency.

Replication in International Relations: Successes & Failures in Practice

The largest International Relations conference, ISA’s 55th Annual Convention (March 26-29, 2014), features two panels on replication and reproducibility this year. The second panel covers “Replication in International Relations: Successes & Failures in Practice.”

Many academic journals hesitate to publish replications

While most political scientists would agree that replications and cross-checks advance knowledge, many academic journals hesitate to publish replications. John Ishiyama, University of North Texas, discusses how replication studies can get published to create more incentives to do replications.