While the social sciences have made impressive progress in adopting transparent research practices that facilitate verification, replication, and reuse of materials, the problem of publication bias persists. Bias on the part of peer reviewers and journal editors, as well as the use of outdated research practices by authors, continues to skew literature…
Holds our Projects and Project specific data
Improving Research Transparency, Reproducibility and Open Science Research in Burkina Faso
This training aims to contribute to empowering the next generation with the appropriate tools and the road map used to conduct transparent, reproducible, and open research. We will train master’s students, Ph.D. candidates, postdocs, junior faculty, and researchers in Economics, Political Sciences, and Public policy in methods for transparent, open, and reproducible…
Brazilian Open Science Training: principles and tools
Search results that cannot be reproduced are not trustworthy. Despite recent moves towards a more open and transparent social science, Brazil faces challenges both in the belief in the importance of principles and in the implementation of transparency and reproducibility practices. We argue that the way to change this paradigm is through…
Making research more tangible to study participants and communities: templates for dissemination of study findings
This project aims to amplify open science and research transparency by fostering the communication of research findings for study participants and the overall community. Although several studies in public health rely on the participation of human individuals who give their time and share their data, many times their knowledge about research findings…
Doing Open Science: Reproducibility, Transparency, and Ethics in Social Sciences
Social science should be widely available for critical interpretation and contribution to foster open societies. The “Haciendo Ciencia Abierta” workshop aims to strengthen research practices by providing the Spanish-speaking community with approaches and free, open-source tools for transparent and reproducible social sciences. The 3-day synchronous remote workshop will take place at the…
Payments and Governance Research Program reproducible workflow onboarding
The Payments and Governance Research Program conducts large-scale Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) and provides independent, rigorous, and scientific evidence on India’s social policies. We are committed to going beyond transparency on the front end and want to ensure that our entire research pipeline—from power calculations to data analysis—is transparent and reproducible. To…
Advancing research transparency, reproducibility, and ethical research at Busara Center and partner organizations.
Reproducibility is important for research because it ensures transparency and clarity on what was exactly done by researchers. This project aims to support Busara Center in developing or improving the existing open science protocols and will involve the development of training materials and protocols as well as holding training sessions with staff…
Research Transparency and Reproducibility: A Complementary Module for All
Engagement with Research Transparency and Reproducibility can be challenging in a classroom, where students are more likely to worry about an upcoming quiz rather than a system of perverse incentives and questionable practices that characterize academic research. Creating a full-length course on the subject is wonderful where possible, but may not be…
Starting from Scratch: Training Teachers and Students of Tribhuvan University, Nepal on Fundamentals of Research Ethics and Transparency
At Tribhuvan University, Nepal, graduate, and undergraduate students conduct a mini-research project or write a thesis in the last year of study. They receive training in research methods and related coursework. However, the course curricula do not have research ethics and transparency component. As a result, students are missing out on learning…
Pre-Specification and Reproducibility – Applications for Academic and Private Sector Research
Open science best practices are not universally adopted in the social sciences and are often not included in graduate-level curricula, despite the potential for pre-specification and reproducibility practices to enhance credibility in both academic and private-sector research. This project seeks to introduce graduate students to the many avenues through which open science…
Evidence on Research Transparency in Economics
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…
The State of Social Science (3S) Survey
Has there been a meaningful movement toward open science practices within the social sciences in recent years? Discussions about changes in practices such as posting data and pre-registering analyses have been marked by controversy—including over the extent to which change has taken place. This study, based on the State of Social Science…
Open Science in Agricultural Economics: Promoting Replicability, Reproducibility, and Transparency in Research
Agricultural and applied economists (AAE) play a key role in delivering information and insight that contributes to policy in agriculture, the environment, and development. The success of these policies depends on the quality and transparency of the underlying research. However, standard MSc and PhD curricula in the field do not cover many…
Filling in the gaps: a workshop to promote, improve, and implement transparency and reproducibility tools in health economics research
This project aims to improve open science (OS) practices in health economics research (HER) through the promotion of transparency and reproducibility (TR) tools. Although HER has a huge impact on the policy-making process, transparent and reproducible research has not been entirely fulfilled. The practice of OS standards within the community has been…
Improving research transparency and visibility of null findings in observational studies of secondary data
Publication bias is well documented in the social sciences. Only a fraction of scholarship reporting null results is made accessible to the public. One way to increase the visibility of this work is to post a pre-analysis plan (PAP) which has the added benefit of improving research transparency. However, despite the rising…
Development of Research Transparency and Reproducibility Curriculum and Training Modules for Debre Markos University
Research Transparency and Reproducibility (RT2) curriculum and training manuals are essential to improve knowledge and skill towards RT2 like research ethics, scientific misconduct, pre-registration, and pre-analysis plans, computational reproducibility and approaches to replication, and data management. However, the lack of standard curriculums and training manuals in the areas of RT2 has been…
Open Science in Language Research
Esra Ataman, Bilal Kirkici, and Ozan Can Çağlar developed a module titled ‘Open Science in Language Research’ and incorporated it into the graduate course “Quantitative Research Methods and Ethics in Language Research.” The goal of the module was to raise awareness in language researchers, who are underserved compared to other disciplines, to…
Transparency and Equity in Pre-Doctoral Research
Pre-doctoral research positions are becoming increasingly common in economics and related fields. While these pre-docs are often responsible for data collection, cleaning, and analysis, there are no open science initiatives geared toward those who will fill these positions. Furthermore, pre-doctoral researchers in economics tend to have similar backgrounds in terms of demographics…
New Branches of the Student Initiative for Open Science
The Student Initiative for Open Science (SIOS) organizes events, workshops, and discussions to promote transparent and open research among students. As SIOS is based in Amsterdam, it has not been possible to accommodate interested students from other universities. The proposed project aims to encourage and enable interested students to start a new…
Developing Content and Training for Transparent, Reproducible, and Ethical Research in Brazil
The objective of this project is to promote the dissemination of methods and practices for the transparency and reproducibility of research in Social Sciences at the Federal University of Parana, and also to provide materials for training in Brazilian Portuguese language. The project is structured according to the book by Christensen et…
Advancing Transparency and Reproducibility in Constrained Contexts in Public Health
Public health practitioners frequently find themselves in a bind: faced with high volumes of data, frequent demands for non-standard analyses, and quick turnaround times, even the most rigorous and transparent workflows are not safe from analysis breakdown and miscommunication, something seen all-too-frequently during the COVID-19 crisis. Therefore, there is a need to…
A Breath of Fresh Air: Raising Awareness for Clean Fuel Adoption
Air pollution is amongst the gravest public health concerns worldwide and indoor sources are the largest contributors in many developing countries. Attempts to persuade hoseholds to use more efficient solid-fuel cooking stoves have been mostly unsuccessful in reducing air pollution. We build on a new, nation-wide program in India that has provided…
Direct and Spillover Impacts of a Community-Level HIV/AIDS Program: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Mozambique
We study a prominent effort to help families cope with HIV/AIDS: a U.S. government-funded program in Mozambique implementing an interrelated set of health and education interventions. We report the results of a randomized evaluation of this program. We hypothesize that the program raises HIV testing rates by reducing imperfect information (related to…
Entrepreneurship education and teacher training in Rwanda
In Rwanda, 72 percent of employed youth work for family firms or are self-employed. These outcomes suggest that schools may be failing to develop the skills required to enter formal sector jobs or grow small firms. In response, Rwanda reformed its required upper secondary entrepreneurship course by introducing interactive pedagogy and a…
The Supply and Demand Effects of Financial Incentives: Experimental Evidence from Branchless Banking in Indonesia
We propose to test the effects of an increase of monetary incentives paid to frontline service providers and the effect of making their pay transparent on the take-up of a new technology. The context is one of a large bank that hires local branchless banking agents to introduce a new savings account…
The Impact of a Multidimensional Program on Nutrition and Poverty in Burkina Faso
This study adapts BRAC’s ultra-poverty program to focus on child nutrition, household food security and resilience, and evaluates its impact in two regions of Burkina Faso. In our study, we test the hypothesis that a targeted cash transfer, asset transfer, and nutrition-focused project can transform the early childhood environment to reduce poverty…
The Short Term Impact of a Productive Asset Transfer in Families with Child Labor: Experimental Evidence from the Philippines
Productive asset grants have become an important tool in efforts to push the very poor out of poverty, but we have little evidence on the impact of such grants on adolescents living in beneficiary households. A successful productive asset grant could reduce child labor via a wealth effect if child labor markets…
What are the Effects of Improving Management Practices on Exporting among SMEs in Middle-Income Countries*? A Comparison of Bayesian and Frequentist Impact Evaluation Approaches
We will run a randomized experiment to test whether improving management practices can achieve these goals, in the context of a government-sponsored management technical assistance program in one middle-income country.
A Framework for Open Policy Analysis
The evidence-based policy movement promotes the use of empirical evidence to inform policy decision-making. While this movement has gained traction over the last two decades, several concerns about the credibility of empirical research have been identified in scientific disciplines that use research methods and practices that are commonplace in policy analysis. As…
PhD Toolkit on Transparent, Open, and Reproducible Research
This project will train PhD students in Economics, Political Science, and other empirical social sciences in methods for transparent, open and reproducible research. There is no course offering such training at the EUI currently and this project will provide an opportunity for PhD students to develop an essential toolkit on research transparency…
Policy Researcher Reproducibility and Transparency in Colombia
Colombian law dictates that information or data gathered during public policy evaluations, after being anonymized, must be publicly available. However, this is usually not the case in practice. Methods exist to rectify this situation, but there is low adoption of these methods. This project involves two workshops in Bogotá and Cartagena targeted…
A University Goes Open – An Interdisciplinary Open Science Curriculum for all Graduate Schools
This project will create reusable course materials for open science and reproducibility topics in a modular structure. The basic material will be the same across disciplines. However, discipline-specific add-ons are planned with specific reading lists and homework assignments. A key part of the project is to use existing infrastructures at the host…
Transparency in Economic Research – An Opportunity for Ecuador
The project will expose bachelors and masters students to open science, a topic that has not yet been included in curricula at Universidad de Cuenca. With small practical tasks, participants will be guided through a hands-on experience of how to make empirical research transparent, why it is so important, the frustration that…
Incorporating Reproducibility and Transparency in an Undergraduate Economics Course
This project developed lectures and hands-on materials to teach key reproducibility, replication, and transparency concepts for an undergraduate economics audience. The goal is to translate existing BITSS materials for students who have no research experience, setting the stage for them to develop good research habits as early as possible. The output includes…
Improving Reproducibility and Transparency Practices in Public Health Research in Mexico: A Working Group and Short Course
The Catalysts developed Standard Operating Procedures and established an institutional hub with resources for research transparency and reproducibility at the National Institute of Public Health (INSP) in Mexico. The group also developed modular coursework for MSc in Public Health students, incorporating open science tools and practices in research design, data collection and…
Introducing Transparency, Reproducibility and Open Science Research in South Africa, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso
This training aims to contribute to empowering the next generation of African researchers with the appropriate tools to conduct transparent research. The Catalysts will introduce the concepts of transparency, reproducibility, and Open science at three universities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Topics will include pre-registration and pre-analysis plans, data sharing, code sharing, replication, and…
AP Psychology Workshop: Embedding Transparent Practices in Psychological Research for High School Students
As non-traditional researchers, high school students represent a potential Trojan horse for changing scientific practices and norms. This 4-week project-based learning course aims to complement the existing Advanced Placement (AP) psychology curriculum for high school students, which does not currently include openness or transparency in research. The Catalyst will collaborate with an…
Practical Tools for an Open Science Project, from Literature Review to Accessible Publication
This project will develop a modularized, intensive workshop that takes undergraduate and graduate students in cognitive science, experimental psychology, and linguistics through a full research cycle (from literature search and hypothesis generation to publication) with a focus on reproducibility. The 4-day workshop will be spread over three thematic blocks: (1) Literature review…
Research Transparency Workshop
This workshop will familiarize social science researchers with research transparency in both teaching practices and research. Workshop activities will include (1) organizing file structures, (2) creating understandable variable labels and value codes, as well as connecting variables to survey instruments through consistent labels and codebook creation, (3) version control of code and…
PhD Level Course: Transparent, Open, and Reproducible Policy Research
This course aims to train graduate students at the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Policy Analysis and researchers at the RAND Corporation in the essential theories and methods of transparent, open, and reproducible research. This elective can be taken by graduate students with an analytic concentration in “Social and Behavioral Science” as…
Reproducible Research Computational Tools for the Next Generation of Social, Behavioral and Policy Scholars
In developing countries, accepted applicants to pursue PhD studies in highly-developed countries in the Social, Behavioral and Policy (SBP) fields will face several challenges. It will be particularly challenging to develop abilities to carry out research in a more transparent way, considering that this topic may not be present in the curriculum.…
Southeast Asian Social Sciences Workshops for Transparency and Reproducibility
Reproducibility, transparency and openness of research has received a lot of attention and resources in Western countries, but the global South and East have had fewer opportunities to participate in these important developments in many research areas. This project will bring to five mainland Southeast Asian institutions with whom the Catalyst has…
Knowledge Sharing on Best Practices in Research Transparency and Reproducibility to Address the File Drawer Problem and Publication Bias in Rwanda
This project seeks to share knowledge and skills to motivate open, transparent, and reproducible research in order to address the file drawer problem and publication bias in Rwanda, as well as to improve the usability of research findings for policy-making. The Catalyst will first conduct exploratory research on the extent of the…
Research Transparency and Reproducibility in the Social Sciences and Impact Evaluation Workshop
In order to raise the quality of academic manuscripts written by Niger’s graduate students to allow them to compete in the demanding arena of research, the Catalyst has partnered with the UC Berkeley OASIS Initiative to organize a three-day intensive bootcamp on research transparency and reproducibility in social science research and impact…
Research Transparency in Brazilian Political and Social Science: A First Look
May 2017 – July 2018
Pre-Analysis Plans: A Stocktaking
May 2017 – July 2018
Fostering Transparency in Government Institutions and Higher Education: A Research and Teaching Initiative
Locations: University of Nottingham, UK; Recife, Brazil; Brasilia, Brazil We find research findings resulting from data that is not publicly accessible to not be credible. Similarly, governments withholding administrative information should not be trusted. We argue that the lack of government and research transparency are connected, and can be tackled in by…
Best Practices of Openness for African Researchers and Research Transparency Workshops at Three Social Science Conferences
Locations: LSE-Africa Summit, London School of Economics, London, UK; Population Association of America, Chicago, IL; University of Dschang, Cameroon; UNU-MERIT, Maastricht, Netherlands This project will communicate best practices for openness and reproducibility in research. We will hold a workshop for African researchers at the University of Dschang in Cameroon, focusing on sensitizing…
Improving transparency of complex interventions through the facilitation of process evaluation training
Locations: National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG), Health Behaviour Change Research Group (HBCRG) Process evaluation is a way of investigating how well an intervention, programme or treatment was implemented as intended. It is crucial for facilitating transparency in the development, conduct and reporting of interventions in numerous research fields, including psychology, social science and…
Research Transparency in the Social Sciences Workshop, Second Edition
Location: University of Kinshasa (The Democratic Republic of the Congo) Research Transparency is gaining attention in the scientific community around the world, including the United States, European countries, and Anglophone countries in sub-Saharan Africa; yet the concept is quite a “new world” in Francophone Africa. In my efforts to advance the movement in…