Welcome to the BITSS Blog

Research transparency in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons learned and ways forward

Guest post by Soazic Elise Wang Sonne (World Bank) Despite efforts by African governments to significantly raise public spending on scientific research, the continent, which is home to 14% of the world’s population, contributes to less than 1% of published research outputs (David Dunne, 2017). While this can be partly attributed to…

Interpretation of study results (Part 2/2): A reproducible method

Guest post by Arnaud Vaganay (Meta-Lab) This post is the second of two dedicated to the reproducible interpretation of empirical results in the social sciences. In my previous post on the interpretation of study results, I contrasted the notions of: Analytic reproducibility, which is concerned with the reproducibility of empirical analyses (typically…

Transparency and Trust in the Research Ecosystem

CEGA launched the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) based on the argument that more transparency in research could address underlying factors driving publication bias, unreliable research findings, a lack of reproducibility in the published literature, and a problematic incentive structure within the research ecosystem.  Meanwhile an ever-increasing number…

Open Science Comes To Policy Analysis

The Royal Society’s motto, “Take nobody’s word for it,” reflects a key principle of scientific inquiry: as researchers, we aspire to discuss ideas in the open, to examine our analyses critically, to learn from our mistakes, and to constantly improve. This type of thinking shouldn’t guide only the creation of rigorous evidence…

Open Science and a Culture of Health: You Two Should Talk

Guest post by Sean Grant and Kathryn Bouskill (RAND Corporation) The Open Science movement aims to advance scientific progress by making research more open and accessible. The Culture of Health movement aims to advance collective well-being by making health a shared value and priority among all policy sectors, not just healthcare. Proponents…

2017 Annual Meeting Showcases Innovations for Transparent and Reproducible Science

By: Kelsey Mulcahy, BITSS Program Manager The 2017 Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) moved beyond the credibility crisis in social science research to discuss potential solutions. The two-day event featured a workshop, two panel discussions, an award ceremony for the 2017 Leamer-Rosenthal Prize Recipients,…

Navigating the Garden of Forking Paths

Guest post by Kweku Opoku-Agyemang (Center for Effective Global Action, Cornell Tech, and International Growth Centre) Improving ethical and transparency standards within and across the social and behavioral science professions appears to be more of a journey than a destination. Thankfully, this is a voyage that has an ever-growing number of travelers.…

Diary of a Research Transparency Postdoc: South America Tour

Fernando Hoces de la Guardia – BITSS Postdoctoral Scholar I joined BITSS in September as its first postdoc and was excited to hit the ground running with a series of events to promote research transparency in Latin America. Through partnerships with local universities, we managed to organize back-to-back seminars in Chile, Peru…

The Power of Bias in Economics Research

Tom Stanley, friend of BITSS and one of the leaders of the Meta-Analysis of Economics Research Network (MAER-Net), recently published a paper in The Economic Journal with John Ioannidis and Chris Doucouliagos on statistical power in economics research that should be of interest to the BITSS network. From Tom: “The power of…

Recipients of 2017 Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science

The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) awards eight prizes to researchers and educators demonstrating values and practices of openness and transparency in research. BERKELEY, CA (Thursday, October 12, 2017) – The open science community has grown rapidly in recent years, partly in response to a series of newsworthy…

Public Data that Isn’t (or Wasn’t) Public

–Guest Post: Justin Gallagher, Assistant Professor of Economics, Case Western Reserve University           I recently completed a coauthored working paper, together with Paul J. Fisher, that examines whether electronic monitoring via red light traffic cameras leads to fewer vehicle accidents and injuries.  As part of the project, we…

Review of Stata’s dyndoc

Guest post: Tomas Dvorak is a Professor of Economics at Union College and a former Project TIER fellow. This is a repost. The original post can be found here. As a huge fan of Stata I was super-excited about dynamic markdown documents newly available in the latest Stata 15 release. I played with…

Kicking off a new partnership with The Choice Lab at the 68° North Conference

Jennifer Sturdy–BITSS Program Advisor Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth. It seems fitting that I read a book which references this Jules Verne quote just before our BITSS panel on research…

It Depends…(and not on the weather)

A read out on key questions from Day 2 of our Research Transparency and Reproducibility Workshop (RT2) in Berkeley, California. Well, Day 1 of RT2 was foggy – but Day 2 brought the Northern California rain. If you participated in Day 2, or visited our OSF page to follow along on your…

Trying to clear the fog

We had a lovely, foggy morning start to our Research Transparency and Reproducibility Training (RT2) here in Berkeley yesterday, and we have already had the opportunity to enjoy some great conversations with participants and faculty alike. One early suggestion brought to us by Arnaud Vaganay was the need to first frame what…

Questions from Our Latest Workshop

Garret Christensen–BITSS Project Scientist I’m in Barcelona, where I delivered a reproducibility workshop and am attending the International Meeting on Experimental and Behavioral Social Sciences (IMEBESS).  The materials from the workshop are available on Github, as always. I got several good questions from the workshop participants, some methodological, some software, and I…

Reproducibility of Research: Issues and Proposed Remedies – A Sackler Colloquium Reflection

Guest post: Cynthia M. Kroeger, Postdoctoral Fellow, Nutrition Obesity Research Center, University of Alabama at Birmingham From March 8-10, 2017, I had the honor of joining scientific researchers, publishers, journalists, entrepreneurs, and funders from all over the world to discuss Reproducibility of Research: Issues and Proposed Remedies. This Sackler colloquium of the…

Reflections from BITSS’s First Workshop in South Asia

By BITSS Program Manager Kelsey Mulcahy You’ve probably noticed the growing interest in research transparency and reproducibility issues and training – conversations with your colleagues, increasing numbers of high-profile panels – and of course, a number of BITSS workshops this Spring from UC Merced, California to Cuernavaca, Mexico to Delhi, India. We…

BITSS Preprints launches today!

Launching BITSS Preprints, an interdisciplinary archive of articles focused on improving research transparency and reproducibility. During the BITSS Annual Meeting in December 2016, several researchers approached us about launching a new Working Paper series. The reason was simple – a common challenge faced by leaders and soon-to-be-leaders in the research transparency and…

Accepting Nominations for the 2017 Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science

It’s that time of the year again! We’re excited to announce a third round of Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science! Since the inaugural round two years ago, BITSS has awarded 17 Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science in an effort to reward social scientists who do the hard and often unrecognized…

Announcing 8 New Catalyst Training Grants!

The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) is pleased to announce the recipients of our first round of competitively selected Catalyst grants![1] Over the next year, 12 BITSS Catalysts will carry out 8 projects in 10 countries, holding conferences, workshops, and summer schools, and developing curriculum for both traditional…

Research Transparency Workshops in Cameroon, South Africa, and the UK

Guest post: Elise Wang Sonne, United Nations University-MERIT, Netherlands 2016 was definitely a very exciting year for me as a BITSS Catalyst, as I organized three transparency and reproducibility workshops in Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. The transparency journey ended with my speech during the 2016 OpenCon Conference on a plenary panel on…

R for Stata Users

Garret Christensen —BITSS Project Scientist For whatever reason, economists use a lot of Stata. It does what we want to do (data cleaning, regression analysis, data visualization) well, and the $1,000 fees we pay every other version or so doesn’t seem to have stopped its widespread adoption. But is that changing, and…

Accepting proposals for a third round of SSMART Grants!

BITSS is launching the third round of our Social Science Meta-Analysis and Research Transparency (SSMART) Grants – this time with a focus on research led by or partnered with researchers in the Global South. The SSMART grant initiative seeks to support and encourage important meta-research in the social sciences in order to…

Our 2017 ASSA Session

Garret Christensen –BITSS Project Scientist BITSS organized a session on meta-analysis and reproducibility in economics for the recent Allied Social Sciences Associations (ASSA, but better known as the AEAs, the largest annual economics conference and job market for PhD economists) in Chicago. Chicago, as much of the country, was in the midst…

StatTag: New Tool for Reproducible Research

Guest Post: Richard Ball, Associate Professor of Economics, Haverford College & Director, Project TIER R Markdown is a great tool.  It ensures reproducibility by incorporating both text and chunks of R code in a single source file that can be rendered into a formatted report, with results generated by the R code…

Goldilocks RCTs

SSMART grant recipients Fiona Burlig, Louis Preonas, and Matt Woerman have released a working paper based on their work on power calculations. With permission we’re reposting Fiona Burlig’s blog post here in its entirety. Check out the paper, or download the Stata code and see the pre-registration on the OSF. You can…

Winners of the 2016 Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science

The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences awards ten prizes this year to researchers working to forward the values of openness and transparency in research. BERKELEY, CA (Thursday, December 15, 2016) – Since its inception as an initiative within the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) in 2012, the Berkeley…

BITSS Annual Meeting Morning Software Workshop Details

Garret Christensen–BITSS Project Scientist If you’re coming to the Annual Meeting this Thursday, you may be curious what exactly we’re doing during the optional training workshop Thursday morning. I’ll give a brief overview of software tools that can help with reproducible workflow, and then we’ll spend most of the time demonstrating dynamic…

Announcing two of nine winners of the 2016 Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science: Michèle Nuijten and Sacha Epskamp!

If you’re anything like us here at the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), you’ve been on the lookout for the most notable innovators in research transparency and reproducibility. That’s why we were thrilled to receive 44 nominations for researchers and educators from 18 disciplines and sub-disciplines and 12…

BITSS issues Call for Projects to Current Catalysts

BITSS began almost four years ago as a small, but strong grassroots movement to change how social science is conducted to be more transparent and reproducible. After years of events, trainings, and publications, BITSS launched its Catalyst Program last November to harness its growing, grassroots network of social scientists dedicated to changing…

BITSS in the APS Observer | Open Science Training in Kenya

BITSS Director Jen Sturdy and Catalyst Stephanie Wykstra wrote a blog post about an open science workshop co-hosted by BITSS and IPA in Kenya earlier this year. In it, they situate the workshop within the larger transparency movement and put forth some important questions for researchers to consider as they construct their…

Panel on Reproducible Journalism

–Garret Christensen, BITSS Project Scientist Last month a colleague of mine from the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), John Bohannon, and I organized a panel discussion on the subject of reproducible journalism for Stanford’s Computation + Journalism Symposium. John is a contributing correspondent for Science, but he’s been visiting BIDS for…

Berkeley Initiative Scales up Research Transparency and Reproducibility Trainings

Annual trainings will bring together researchers from across the social sciences to promote transparency and reproducibility in social science research Berkeley, Calif – Sept. 30, 2016 – To scale up and institutionalize open science trainings, the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) award…

Accepting Nominations for the 2016 Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science

In an effort to reward social scientists who do the hard work of advancing practices of transparency and the use of reproducible methods in research, BITSS is accepting nominations for the 2016 Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science. BITSS will award $10,000 to $15,000 to faculty who have incorporated research transparency methods…

Research Transparency in Social Sciences Landed in Francophone Africa

Guest Post: Zacharie Tsala Dimbuene, University of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo Everything started in March 2016, when I attended a workshop in Athi River (Nairobi, Kenya) organized by Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences about “Research Transparency in Social Sciences” (RTSS, hereafter). What caught my attention first is…

Upcoming Opportunities: Call for Papers x2, Nominations x1

We’ve got three big opportunities coming up. Two are new announcements, and one is a reminder. NEW: Annual Meeting Call for Papers– The 5th BITSS Annual Meeting will be in Berkeley December 15-16. This is our annual forum to highlight advances in the field of transparency and reproducibility across the social sciences.…

Open Source Interfaces with the Programmable Web Facilitate Replications of Big Data Analyses in Social Science Research

Guest Post: Ulrich Matter and Alois Stutzer, University of Basel The replicability of social science research is becoming more demanding in the age of big data. First, researchers aiming to replicate a study based on massive data face substantial computational costs. Second, and probably more challenging, they are often confronted with “highly…

An Inside Perspective of a Registered Replication Report (RRR)

Irene Cheung, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Western University – Huron Lorne Campbell, Professor of Social Psychology at Western University  Etienne LeBel, BITSS Project Scientist In the spring of 2014 we (i.e., Irene Cheung, Lorne Campbell and Etienne LeBel) decided to submit a proposal to Perspectives on Psychological Science for a Registered Replication Report…

Research Transparency Enhances Evidence Credibility in East Africa

EASST fellow Saint Kizito Omala, Lecturer at Makerere University and Senior Examinations Officer at the Uganda National Examinations Board. Technical details, which are often hidden, are what guarantee the  credibility of published scientific work. In this regard, Research Transparency (RT) is a primer! To lay bare all retraceable procedures and facts that…

UC Berkeley and California Government Data Sharing Forum

BITSS and Berkeley Opportunity Lab When a representative from the California Judicial Council attended the BITSS Annual Meeting last December, she asked the group an interesting question – if we want to be more transparent and share data, how can we do so in a responsible way that limits risk to those…

Save the Dates: Upcoming BITSS Events

If you’re interested in joining BITSS and others as a presenter at a conference session on transparency, replication, and reproducibility at the Institute for New Economic Thinkings’ Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) Plenary in Budapest Oct 19-22, please contact Garret. We’re hoping to submit a session proposal by the end of July. The…

Mid-Summer Recap

Garret Christensen–BITSS Project Scientist BITSS and I have been busy lately. Here’s a quick rundown: If you want to learn or teach reproducible programming, Software Carpentry is one of the best organizations out there–check out their lesson materials and see if they’re offering a workshop near you. I got hooked up with…