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? 

Advertisement

Getting the idea of transparency all wrong

Following an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, which portrayed scientists who re-use data as parasites, we now hear more on this from Nature. Apparently, data transparency is a menace to the public. The Nature comment “Don’t let transparency damage science” claims that the research community must protect authors from harassment by replicators. The piece further infects the discussion about openness with more absurd ideas that don’t reflect reality, and it leads the discussion backwards, not forward. 

Don’t review articles that withhold data

Journal editors can enforce replication policies. Authors can decide to work transparently. Most initiatives for open science and reproducibility agree that editors and authors are  are the key actors to enforce the gold standard of research integrity. However, peer-reviewers can use their leverage as well: just say you will only review an article once the author provides the data.

Reproducible Research in Biomedical Science – We’re not there yet

A new PLoS Biol aper on reproducible research practices across the biomedical literature examines if authors provide all data, code and funding information. The results are devastating.

Political Scientists Trying to Delay Research Transparency

A group of 625 political scientists signed a petition to delay the new APSA guidelines for transparency. They want to discuss the implications for qualitative data, hand-written field notes and confidential data first. I agree that practical discussions are necessary – but this should not be a reason to abandon the transparency guidelines.

Open peer review: What are the benefits and pitfalls?

Should journals publish review reports alongside a paper? At the meeting “The future of scholarly scientific communication” at the Royal Society it seemed that there is a general agreement: yes – we need more transparency. However, opinions were divided if reviewers’ names should be published as well.

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.

Against publication bias: Politics journal invites pre-registered papers

After fields like Psychology have explored pre-registration of studies, now Political Science follows the trend for more transparency in research. A high ranking journal, Comparative Political Studies, plans a special issue in which all papers have to be pre-registered and are submitted without the results section. I asked Michael Findley, one of the editors behind the initative, about publication bias and transparency in the field.

Why we all want ‘others’ to do replication studies

Reproducibility is held as the gold standard for scientific research. The legitimacy of any published work depends on the question: can we replicate the analysis and come to the same results? Therefore, authors have to provide information on how exactly they collected the data and conducted the analysis. Without such transparency about the research process, scholars cannot evaluate work, fully understand the value of results, and move on to build further, new knowledge, as King (1995) has pointed out. But why are so few scholars doing replication studies?

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.”