Abstract
In this paper, we present three retrospective observational studies that investigate the relation between data sharing and statistical reporting inconsistencies. Previous research found that reluctance to share data was related to a higher prevalence of statistical errors, often in the direction of statistical significance (Wicherts, Bakker, & Molenaar, 2011). We therefore hypothesized that journal policies about data sharing and data sharing itself would reduce these inconsistencies. In Study 1, we compared the prevalence of reporting inconsistencies in two similar journals on decision making with different data sharing policies. In Study 2, we compared reporting inconsistencies in psychology articles published in PLOS journals (with a data sharing policy) and Frontiers in Psychology (without a stipulated data sharing policy). In Study 3, we looked at papers published in the journal Psychological Science to check whether papers with or without an Open Practice Badge differed in the prevalence of reporting errors. Overall, we found no relationship between data sharing and reporting inconsistencies. We did find that journal policies on data sharing seem extremely effective in promoting data sharing. We argue that open data is essential in improving the quality of psychological science, and we discuss ways to detect and reduce reporting inconsistencies in the literature.
Highlights
In this paper, we present three retrospective observational studies that investigate the relation between data sharing and statistical reporting inconsistencies
The downside of this method is that it does not take into account that results within one article may be statistically dependent
Based on our analyses we found no evidence for our two hypotheses: Judgment and Decision Making (JDM) did not show a larger decrease in inconsistencies and gross inconsistencies than JBDM after the introduction of the data sharing policy in JDM
Summary
We present three retrospective observational studies that investigate the relation between data sharing and statistical reporting inconsistencies. Over the past few years there has been increasing awareness that the availability of research data is essential for scientific progress (Anagnostou et al, 2015; Nosek et al, 2015; Wicherts, 2011; Wilkinson et al, 2016), and several journals have started to request authors to share their data when they submit an article (e.g., in PLOS and Psychological Science; see Bloom, Ganley, & Winker, 2014; Lindsay, 2017; respectively) We theorized that such journal policies on data sharing could help decrease the prevalence of statistical reporting inconsistencies, and that articles with open data (regardless of journal policy) contained fewer inconsistencies. Exploratory findings across the three studies are reported in a final results section
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