Written for the BITSS Blog by Maria Ruth Jones, Senior Economist at the World Bank’s Development Impact Group.
Imagine a world where every policy decision is backed by transparent, reproducible evidence—where anyone can verify the numbers behind the headlines. The World Bank has just taken a major step toward making this vision a reality. We are encouraging all our publications to include a reproducibility package the code, data, and documentation that allow a third party to reproduce the findings. In September, the World Bank scaled this up by introducing a strict reproducibility requirement to the World Bank’s Policy Research Working Paper series. We now expect all Working Papers that include empirical or experimental work or simulations to be reproducible.
Why the World Bank is Investing in Reproducibility
The World Bank is a major producer of development research. Our findings are used for policy decisions every day. By requiring researchers to “show their work”, we make every assumption, analytical decision, and data processing step visible. This increases transparency, credibility, and impact.
The World Bank’s Reproducible Research Initiative builds on our commitments to open data and open knowledge, and positions the Policy Research Working Paper (PRWP) series at the forefront of the open science movement.
Making reproducibility packages public allows for greater scrutiny, builds confidence in findings, and accelerates progress. When data and code are public, others can replicate and extend the findings, making the science of development stronger and faster.
The Reproducibility Initiative in Practice
We encourage every publication to meet the standard of computational reproducibility: a third party can reproduce the results of the report, using the data, code, and documentation provided by the authors. Authors prepare a reproducibility package for their publication that contains:
- A complete list of all data sources used in the analysis and instructions for accessing it (data is included directly in the package where permissible)
- The code and scripts that show all steps from data processing to creation of all tables and charts
- Documentation sufficient for a third party to reproduce the results
Our internal reproducibility team verifies that each package is complete and functional. Under the new requirement, authors must have a verified reproducibility package before submitting their paper for publication in the Policy Research Working Paper series. We distinguish papers that pass the reproducibility check with a highly visible reproducible research badge.
We publish verified packages to the World Bank’s Reproducible Research Repository, a new central repository for reproducible research. The published packages are permanent and citable, with digital object identifiers.
Each published package includes rich metadata, for discoverability, and links to the World Bank’s Data Catalogues (for source data) and Open Knowledge Repository (for publications). Users can filter packages by publication type, data access (open data, limited access, restricted), software(s) used, and country – or use the search function to query the more detailed metadata.
Impact and Progress
We launched the Reproducibility Initiative in 2023 with a pilot to introduce reproducible research standards, develop support institutional structures, and build staff knowledge of reproducible research practices. Over the past two years, the Reproducibility Initiative has made significant progress. As of October 2025, we have verified more than 300 papers:
- 235 Policy Research Working Papers
- 38 reports and data products
- 33 journal articles by World Bank staff
One key feature of the Reproducibility Initiative is internal, pre-publication reproducibility verification. As multiple studies have shown, asking authors to submit reproducibility packages is not sufficient for reproducibility. Verification is a crucial quality assurance step. Our team has reviewed over 300 packages, and we find that four out of five require modifications to meet computational reproducibility standards.
As we scale, we have invested significantly in building staff capacity for reproducible research, through custom technical assistance, hands-on training, guidance notes, and tools to simplify the process. We see encouraging evidence that authors learn by doing: when an author goes through our process a second time, their packages are more likely to pass review on the first try and are less likely to fail for easily avoidable reasons like lack of documentation or version control problems with outputs.
Looking Ahead
By championing reproducibility, the World Bank is setting a new standard for development research – one that promotes greater transparency, credibility, and impact. All protocols, tools, and resources developed under the initiative are open source and open access, establishing a framework that other institutions can follow and build upon. We are also in the early stages of convening an umbrella initiative for improving reproducibility in development policy, to share experiences and encourage adoption of consistent standards across development research institutions.
Explore the repository: https://reproducibility.worldbank.org
Access protocols and tools: https://worldbank.github.io/wb-reproducible-research-
repository/.
Please reach out to reproducibility@worldbank.org if you’d like to learn more about the
World Bank’s reproducibility initiative or discuss how similar approaches could be
adopted in your institution.