Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Serious concerns about research quality have catalysed a number of reform initiatives intended to improve transparency and reproducibility and thus facilitate self-correction, increase efficiency and enhance research credibility. Meta-research has evaluated the merits of some individual initiatives; however, this may not capture broader trends reflecting the cumulative contribution of these efforts. In this study, we manually examined a random sample of 250 articles in order to estimate the prevalence of a range of transparency and reproducibility-related indicators in the social sciences literature published between 2014 and 2017. Few articles indicated availability of materials (16/151, 11% 95% confidence interval, 7% to 16%), protocols (0/156, 0% 0% to 1%), raw data (11/156, 7% 2% to 13%) or analysis scripts (2/156, 1% 0% to 3%), and no studies were pre-registered (0/156, 0% 0% to 1%). Some articles explicitly disclosed funding sources (or lack of; 74/236, 31% 25% to 37%) and some declared no conflicts of interest (36/236, 15% 11% to 20%). Replication studies were rare (2/156, 1% 0% to 3%). Few studies were included in evidence synthesis via systematic review (17/151, 11% 7% to 16%) or meta-analysis (2/151, 1% 0% to 3%). Less than half the articles were publicly available (101/250, 40% 34% to 47%). Minimal adoption of transparency and reproducibility-related research practices could be undermining the credibility and efficiency of social science research. The present study establishes a baseline that can be revisited in the future to assess progress.
Hardwicke et al. (Sat,) studied this question.