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Contributors:
  1. Theiss Bendixen
  2. John P. A. Ioannidis

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Category: Project

Description: Serious concerns about research quality have catalysed a number of reform initiatives intended to improve transparency and reproducibility and thus facilitate self-correction, increase efficiency and enhance research credibility. Meta-research has evaluated the merits of some individual initiatives; however, this may not capture broader trends reflecting the cumulative contribution of these efforts. In this study, we manually examined a random sample of 250 articles in order to estimate the prevalence of a range of transparency and reproducibility-related indicators in the social sciences literature published between 2014 and 2017. Few articles indicated availability of materials (16/151, 11% [95% confidence interval, 7% to 16%]), protocols (0/156, 0% [0% to 1%]), raw data (11/156, 7% [2% to 13%]) or analysis scripts (2/156, 1% [0% to 3%]), and no studies were pre-registered (0/156, 0% [0% to 1%]). Some articles explicitly disclosed funding sources (or lack of; 74/236, 31% [25% to 37%]) and some declared no conflicts of interest (36/236, 15% [11% to 20%]). Replication studies were rare (2/156, 1% [0% to 3%]). Few studies were included in evidence synthesis via systematic review (17/151, 11% [7% to 16%]) or meta-analysis (2/151, 1% [0% to 3%]). Less than half the articles were publicly available (101/250, 40% [34% to 47%]). Minimal adoption of transparency and reproducibility-related research practices could be undermining the credibility and efficiency of social science research. The present study establishes a baseline that can be revisited in the future to assess progress.

License: CC-By Attribution 4.0 International

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Type: Research
Status: Completed


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Pre-registered study protocol

Hardwicke, Kidwell, Ioannidis & 3 more
To access the formally registered version of this pre-registered protocol, you need to click on the "registrations" tab.

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Materials

Hardwicke, Ioannidis, Kidwell & 3 more
This is a pdf version of the article coding form. Note that in practice we actually used a Google Form which had some dynamic functionality (e.g., onl...

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Data

Hardwicke, Ioannidis, Wallach & 3 more
All raw data generated during the project and associated documentation (codebook) is available below.

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Analysis

Hardwicke, Ioannidis, Wallach & 3 more
These files (along with the data files available here: https://osf.io/u9fw8/) can be used to recreate the manuscript from scratch. The manuscript was...

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Error documentation

Hardwicke, Bendixen, Ioannidis & 3 more

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