Dalson Britto Figueiredo Filho, Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil, who attended the BITSS Summer Institute in June 2014, recently published a paper on the importance of replications in Revista Política Hoje.

“The BITSS experience really changed my mind on how to do good science”, said Figueiredo Filho. “Now I am working to diffuse both replication and transparency as default procedures of scientific inquiry among Brazilian undergraduate and graduate students. I am very thankful to the 2014 BITSS workshop for a unique opportunity to become a better scientist.”

The paper, written in Portuguese, is available here. Below is an abstract in English.

The importance of Replication in Political Science: the case of SIGOBR
The principal aim of this paper is to diffuse the replication standard in Brazilian Social Sciences in general and in Political Science in particular. To do so, we reproduce some arguments that favor replication as default standard in research activity. We argue that replication has three main dimensions: (1) substantive, since it contributes to both increasing the quality and accumulation of scientific knowledge; (2) pedagogical, since it facilitates the understanding of basic data analysis concepts, and (3) transparency, as it protects the scientific community not only from unfortunate mistakes, but also from intentional frauds. In addition, we present the main characteristics of the Government Information System Project (SIGOBR), conducted by the Political Science Department (DCP) of the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), which has now adopted replication as one of its standard features.