ABSTRACT

This award provides partial support for a series of virtual and in-person conferences on the topics of reproducibility, replicability, and transparency in the social sciences. The purpose of scientific publishing is the dissemination of robust research findings, exposing them to the scrutiny of peers and other interested parties. Scientific articles should accurately and completely provide information on the origin and provenance of data and on the analytical and computational methods used. Yet in recent years, doubts about the adequacy of the information provided in scientific articles and their addenda have been voiced. This has been called the replication crisis. The conferences will address the following topics: the initiation of research, the conduct of research, the preparation of research for publication, and the scrutiny after publication. The products of these meetings will be available to any non-participant through videos, presentations materials, and manuscripts. Undergraduates, graduate students, and career researchers will be able to learn about best practices for transparent, reproducible, and scientifically sound research in the social sciences. Research that follows the best practices discussed in the various meetings will be more verifiable, and thus more credible. These qualities are especially important for policy makers that wish to implement evidence-based policymaking, and a public that wishes to understand the foundations of such policies.

Scientific practices throughout the conduct of the research, during peer review, and after the dissemination of results all interact to enable a discourse about the veracity of scientific claims. The investigators will organize a sequence of conferences discussing educational and procedural barriers slowing down adoption of best practices, whether journals should be the verifiers of reproducibility, whether (and how) scientists' work can be made to be reproducible at every stage of the research process, and implications thereof for funding, technical infrastructure, and the training of undergraduate and graduate students. The topics chosen for the series are not usually part of disciplinary seminars or conferences and will be brought to a broader audience here for the first time. Most sessions will be held virtually (online), but others will be co-located with or submitted as complete sessions to professional meetings. The availability of permanent artifacts (presentations, recordings, manuscripts) after the conferences will allow this to be a resource with persistent impacts.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

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