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Category: Project

Description: Recently in psychological science and many related fields, a surprisingly large amount of experiments could not be replicated by independent researchers. A non-replication could indicate that a previous finding might have been a false positive statistical result and the effect does not exist. However, it could also mean that a specific detail of the experimental procedure is essential for the effect to emerge, which might not have been included in the replication attempt. Therefore any replication attempt that does not replicate the original effect is most informative when the original procedure is closely adhered to. One proposed solution to facilitate the replicability of experimental procedures in psychology is to upload the experimental script and materials to a public repository. However, we believe that merely providing the materials of an experimental procedure is not sufficient, as many software solutions are not freely available, software solutions might change, and it is time consuming to set up the entire procedure. We argue that there is a simple solution to these problems when an experiment is conducted using computers: recording an example procedure with a screen capture software and providing the video in an online repository. We therefore provide here a tutorial on screen recordings using an open source screen recording software.