Abstract
Improving Social Science: Lessons from the Open Science Movement
Highlights
Psychology’s current reform movement began with the insight that certain research practices were both problematic (Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn 2011) and widespread (John, Loewenstein, and Prelec 2012)
Misuse of significance testing, researcher degrees of freedom, and post hoc hypothesizing had created a cycle in which flashy but spurious results spread with little attempt of falsification
This was exposed through a series of high-profile replication failures (e.g., Open Science Collaboration 2015) that made the problems visible and created momentum and caused backlash (Baumeister 2016; Gilbert et al 2016)
Summary
Per Engzell, University of Oxford and Stockholm University Julia M. This article asks what social scientists can learn from this story. Our take-home message is that differences in research practices make it difficult to prescribe cures across disciplines, much still can be learned from interdisciplinary exchange. We focus on the practices of open data, open materials, and preregistration. These often are thought of as means to improve the credibility of research—for example, through increasing reproducibility (i.e., ensuring that a reanalysis of the same data results in the same conclusions) and/or replicability (i.e., ensuring that an empirical replication of a study leads to the same conclusions). Open science encompasses other practices such as open access publication and open educational resources, with a broad range of underlying goals, including increased accessibility and reduced inequalities
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