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.

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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.

Reproducibility Pioneers: Political Scientists Assigning Replications to Students

Here are innovative and exciting syllabi of methods courses assigning replication studies to students. The instructors ensure that we build up a cohort of students who value reproducibility, while learning statistics at the same time.

Replication chains: international trade and democracies

Getting replicated gives you citations, but it hurts. Often, authors respond with a paper to defend their earlier work. They often claim the replication was: fundamentally flawed, contains statistical and reporting errors, is of trivial nature, or less realistic and of limited utility. Such replication chains are not just entertaining academic slugfest, but they are useful because they provide discussions about data and methods.

Replication chains: Political tolerance taken apart

How would you like it if someone replicated your paper? Will it help you, and give you more citations, or will it cause rage? Some authors defend their original work against replication by writing an ‘answer’ paper, and they might claim that the replication was fundamentally flawed or contained statistical and reporting errors. Here’s another interesting replication chain.

Replication chains: voter calls and turnout

Sometimes an author, when being replicated by someone, answers to that replication in a new paper. In that new paper (s)he again might replicate some of the disputed results. Most authors defend their earlier paper by claiming that the replication was: fundamentally flawed, contains statistical and reporting errors, is of trivial nature, or less realistic and of limited utility. Such replication chains are not just entertaining academic slugfest, but they are useful because they provide detailed discussions about data and methods in the field.

Replication as a master thesis: “Unfortunately, most students shy away from this”

I recently wrote about a student who was awarded a Masters degree for her replication study at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Political scientist Jonathon W. Moses, who supervised the thesis, explains why more students should dare to replicate articles for a degree.