Rigor, reproducibility, and novel methodological approaches to eating disorders research

Abstract

The explosion of new methods in science has put additional pressure on authors, readers, and peer reviewers to evaluate the rigor and reproducibility of these new approaches. This issue brings together a collection of articles aimed to stimulate our thinking about how to evaluate the quality of these new methodologies, in the form of several expert reviews on domains ranging from large scale genetics to clinical interventions. These expert reviews are followed by a collection of papers intended to illustrate new or underrepresented methods in our field and include novel approaches to clinical trials to the quantification of text data collected from public repositories online. The issue concludes with a number of original data papers applying network analysis to study comorbidity and symptom status in eating disorder and related populations and a couple of novel neuroimaging papers demonstrating the use of new and promising methods for studying heterogeneity and the use of psychophysiology to answer questions about emotion in eating disorder populations.

Open science practices for eating disorders research

“…Markdown files) can streamline the data-sharing process. The IJED published a special issue on rigor and reproducibility (Hildebrandt & Crosby, 2018); several of the articles included code (Forbush et al, 2018;McCaig, Bhatia, Elliott, Walasek, & Meyer, 2018). ( Foradditional examples of code or data sharing, see Vervaet, Puttevils, Hoekstra, Fried, & Vanderhasselt, 2021;Yan et al, 2019.…”

“…Scientific journals play an important role in ensuring that science is, indeed, open, both in terms of access (e.g., open versus restricted) and transparency (e.g., reporting guidelines). Numerous journals, including the International Journal of Eating Disorders (IJED, see Table 1), have updated their policies and provided resources consistent with the open science framework (Alter & Gonzalez, 2018;Forero, Lopez-Leon, & Perry, 2020;Freedland, 2021;Hildebrandt & Crosby, 2018;Hildebrandt & Prenoveau, 2020;Martone, Garcia-Castro, & VandenBos, 2018;Munafò et al, 2017;Nosek et al, 2015;Prager et al, 2019;Tackett, Brandes, King, & Markon, 2019;Tackett, Brandes, & Reardon, 2019). Also, some journals reward open science practices by placing "open research badges" on articles (see https://www.cos.io/initiatives/badges).…”

Rigor and reproducibility for data analysis and design in the study of eating disorders

“…These practices arguably help generate reliable and valid inferences (Prager et al, 2018; Spellman et al, 2017). In 2018, the International Journal of Eating Disorders ( IJED ) advocated for submissions to follow open science guidelines, identifying the benefits of using robust methods and protocols (Hildebrandt & Crosby, 2018). In 2021, the journal prioritized the application of three specific open science principles: receiving open science badges for preregistered work and open‐materials/data sharing, utilizing instructions on how to increase transparency, and registering reports (Burke et al, 2021).…”

40 years of research on eating disorders in domain-specific journals: Bibliometrics, network analysis, and topic modeling

“…Finally, a simple time series analysis will be performed to examine the evolution of these topics over time. The procedure employed for the analyses is detailed in the methods section below (and S5 File ), whereas the dataset and the code to perform the analyses are shared in a public repository ( https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/5YZVD ), allowing the reproducibility of results [ 64 ].…”