Advocating for Reproducibility

As guest editors, we are excited to publish this special double issue ofIASSIST Quarterly. The topics of reproducibility, replicability, and transparency have been addressed in past issues of IASSIST Quarterly and at the IASSIST conference, but this double issue is entirely focused on these issues

Is Your Research Reproducible?

Slides from a presentation, Is Your Research Reproducible? , offered at the University of Rhode Island Libraries on December 1 and December 5, 2017. Learn more about the reproducibility crisis, how tools like the Open Science Framework can help you contribute to solutions, and about how proper management of your code and data helps you and other researchers. Part of the University Libraries\u27 Search Savvy Seminar series. Main file is a PDF file of speaker slides as presented. Supplementary file is a PDF file of speaker slides with notes, including extra slides that were not used for presentation

Failure to Reproduce: The Replication Crisis in Research — Can Librarians Help?

“It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.” Those are the words of John Ioannidis in a highly-cited article from 2005. Ioannidis is referring to the “reproducibility crisis,” a phenomenon whereby researchers are not able to replicate published results in later experiments. A recent survey by Nature found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments and more than half have failed to reproduce their own. In this presentation, we will introduce attendees to the replication crisis and provide real-life examples of reproducibility problems in the fields of psychology, economics, animal research, and biomedical research. We will outline the primary causes of the problem (the “file-drawer” problem, publication bias, poor experimental design, and the incentive structure for researchers) and will also note the unfortunate failure of peer review to weed out many false findings. From there, we will discuss how librarians are assisting researchers in designing reproducible workflows that can help prevent research replication failure. These workflows include proper experimental design, proper management and documentation of research data and code, and the use of open-science tools for registering experiments, collaborating with colleagues, and sharing research outputs. We will conclude with a demonstration of one important tool in this area, the Open Science Framework from the Center for Open Science. We will cover how it works, how to use it to connect to outside services, and its support for versioning, collaboration, and sharing preprints. Attendees will come away with a better understanding of the reproducibility crisis, the role librarians are playing in assisting researchers with reproducible workflows, and a popular tool they can use for doing so