Feb 10, 2016  –  Feb 11, 2016  |  San Diego, California

Transparency and Reproducibility in the Social Sciences

BITSS Catalysts Craig McIntosh and Scott Desposato have organized two upcoming events at UCSD on transparency and reproducibility in the social sciences.

February 10 Lecture – Tackling the Reproducibility Crisis in the Social Sciences

Political Science, Psychology, and economics have each recently taken their turn in the spotlight with instances of influential research that falls apart under scrutiny. There is growing evidence that much social science research features false positives or is not reproducible. I review the source of these problems, then discuss new techniques to increase reproducibility, including changes in journal publication processes and the use of public registries for pre-analysis plans.

February 11 Workshop – A Reproducible Workflow: hands-on introduction to version control and dynamic documents to improve your research

This workshop will introduce you to free software tools that can help make your research more transparent and reproducible. Working through a hands-on example of a research project from beginning to end, I will introduce you to R Studio, R Markdown, git and GitHub, and the Open Science Framework, and together we will walk through the steps required to register a project, conduct analysis, save documents with version control, and post data in a trusted public repository. We will focus on version controland dynamic documents, which allow you to do statistical analysis and write your final paper all in one document. This allows for a completely reproducible paper from beginning to end with just one mouse click.