Introduction to the Special Section on Replication and Data Access

Abstract

Sociological research proceeds to a great degree on trust—trust that investigators have truthfully reported their analyses and trust that they have actually done those analyses correctly. The question is whether this trust is warranted. The answer is that for the most part we do not know. Except in the case where analyses are based on publicly available data sets, it may be difficult if not impossible to replicate what another researcher has done. Even then, without the code that produced the results, it may be difficult to know what the original research actually did. (I spent three months attempting to replicate some results in The Bell Curve, only to be told by Charles Murray that the book inaccurately described the analyses that had been done!) Furthermore, and this is only an impression, sociology journals appear to have little interest in publishing studies that primarily carry out replications or straightforward extensions of existing analyses. Reviewers who are sociologists are too apt to demand that any report must make a theoretical contribution. The contrast with economics, for example, where hundreds if not thousands of articles have been published that examine estimates of the returns to education, is striking. The articles in this issue address the question of access to data. The issue of whether there is too little interest by sociologists and/or sociology journals in publishing articles that primarily take up replications will have to be dealt with at another time. In the first article, Jeremy Freese lays out the argument for journals requiring authors to provide far greater access than they do now. He also addresses many of the past criticisms of this recommendation. In the second article, Gary King describes a relatively simple process by which authors can archive their data and code so that it is permanently available. The last two articles are comments by Glenn Firebaugh, a former editor of the American Sociological Review, and Andrew Abbott, the current editor of the American Journal of Sociology. These journals are generally regarded as the top two journals in the