Re-Blogged: Solid science – How graduate students foster research transparency

Re-Blogged from the InMind blog (and written by me): Reproducibility is seen as the gold standard for solid science. However, three are few incentive to work transparently, and even less incentives to conduct replication studies. To change this, more and more teachers are assigning replication studies to graduate students as a class assignment. Will this turn early career researchers into witch hunters?

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Promoting replications in graduate student teaching

A great way to promote reproducibility in political science is to let graduate students replicate published work. This way, they learn ‘hands-on’ statistics, but also how frustrating it is when authors don’t keep a log of their files and code. In the best case scenario, this encourages a new cohort of political scientists to be transparent in their future work. In the recent symposium on reproducibility in PS: Political Science & Politics (Vol 47, Issue 1), Thomas M. Carsey discusses his experiences of assigning replications to students – a thought-provoking and excellent read! [This blog post is part of a series of posts about the PS symposium, which summarizes and discusses the current state of reproducibility in political science.]

Is there a difference between replication, reproduction, and re-analysis?

In my replication workshop I’ve been discussing with grad students what replication actually is. Some students, from the field of Psychology, said that it involves re-doing data collection from scratch. In political science, I feel reproducing a paper is the same as replicating work: you take the data set, re-run the analysis, and potentially add to that. Here’s a selection of definitions.