Evidence on Research Transparency in Economics

Abstract

A decade ago, the term “research transparency” was not on economists' radar screen, but in a few short years a scholarly movement has emerged to bring new open science practices, tools and norms into the mainstream of our discipline. The goal of this article is to lay out the evidence on the adoption of these approaches – in three specific areas: open data, pre-registration and pre-analysis plans, and journal policies – and, more tentatively, begin to assess their impacts on the quality and credibility of economics research. The evidence to date indicates that economics (and related quantitative social science fields) are in a period of rapid transition toward new transparency-enhancing norms. While solid data on the benefits of these practices in economics is still limited, in part due to their relatively recent adoption, there is growing reason to believe that critics' worst fears regarding onerous adoption costs have not been realized. Finally, the article presents a set of frontier questions and potential innovations.

Open science: Considerations and issues for TESOL research

“…There is an increasing array of empirically demonstrated benefits of methodological transparency (e.g., Gennetian, Tamis‐LeMonda, & Frank, 2020; Miguel, 2021; Schroeder, Gaeta, El Amin, Chow, & Borders, 2023). Transparency creates a more complete understanding of the connected network of materials underlying our research and empirical claims.…”

Biological, material and socio-cultural constraints to effective menstrual hygiene management among secondary school students in Tanzania

“…The post-hoc development of the indices, in some instances, constrains our ability to interpret the results, as the questions were not developed for this purpose. Post-hoc selection of questions can also allow researcher cherry picking of statistically significant results [79], an issue that we are aware but tried to avoid. For transparency, (1) we only selected questions that are clearly linked to each constraint type; (2) Table 2 shows the questions that were not selected due to the researchers' priors; and (3) the exclusion of questions from the indices was based on sample size limitations.…”

A Practical Guide to Registered Reports for Economists

“…In recent years, a growing number of researchers have discussed how research practices can influence the quality of evidence published in scientific journals. It is now well-established that the current A growing number of scientists have called for the use of pre-registration in empirical work to tackle these issues (Nosek and Lakens, 2014;Swanson et al, 2020;Miguel, 2021). In pre-registered studies, researchers pre-specify the analysis to be carried out before examining (or even collecting) the data (Olken, 2015).…”