Analytic reproducibility in articles receiving open data badges at the journal Psychological Science: An observational study
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Authors
For any scientific report, repeating the original analyses upon the original data should yield the original outcomes. We evaluated analytic reproducibility in 25 Psychological Science articles awarded open data badges between 2014 and 2015. Initially, 16 (64%, 95% confidence interval [43,81]) articles contained at least one 'major numerical discrepancy' (>10% difference) prompting us to request input from original authors. Ultimately, target values were reproducible without author involvement for 9 (36% [20,59]) articles; reproducible with author involvement for 6 (24% [8,47]) articles; not fully reproducible with no substantive author response for 3 (12% [0,35]) articles; and not fully reproducible despite author involvement for 7 (28% [12,51]) articles. Overall, 37 major numerical discrepancies remained out of 789 checked values (5% [3,6]), but original conclusions did not appear affected. Non-reproducibility was primarily caused by unclear reporting of analytic procedures. These results highlight that open data alone is not sufficient to ensure analytic reproducibility.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 201494 |
| Journal | Royal Society Open Science |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| ISSN | 2054-5703 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 06.01.2021 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:
Data accessibility. All data, materials and analysis scripts related to this study are publicly available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/n3dej/). To facilitate reproducibility, this manuscript was written by interleaving regular prose and analysis code using knitr [28] and papaja [29], and is available in a Code Ocean container (https://doi.org/ 10.24433/CO.1796004.v3) which re-creates the software environment in which the original analyses were performed. Authors’ contributions. T.E.H. and M.C.F. designed the study. T.E.H., M.B., K.M., E.H., M.B.N., B.N.P., B.E.d.M., B.L., E.J.Y. and M.C.F. conducted the reproducibility checks. T.E.H. performed the data analysis. T.E.H. and M.C.F. wrote the manuscript. M.B. and M.B.N. provided feedback on the manuscript. All authors gave final approval for publication. Competing interests. We declare we have no competing interests. Funding. T.E.H.’s contribution was enabled by a general support grant awarded to the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and a grant from the Einstein Foundation and Stiftung Charité awarded to the Meta-Research Innovation Center Berlin (METRIC-B). Acknowledgements. We are grateful to the authors of the original articles for their assistance with the reproducibility checks. We thank students from Stanford’s Psych 251 class, who contributed to the initial reproducibility checks.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors.
- journal policy, meta-research, open badges, open data, open science, reproducibility
- Psychology