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Level up the reproducibility of your data and code! A 2-hour, hands-on workshop

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Purpose: To introduce methods and tools in organization, documentation, automation, and dissemination of research that nudge it further along the reproducibility spectrum.OutcomeParticipants feel more confident applying reproducibility methods and tools to their own research projects.ProcessParticipants practice new methods and tools with code and data during the workshop to explore what they do and how they might work in a research workflow. Participants can compare benefits of new practices and ask questions to help clarify which would provide them the most value to adopt.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: April Clyburne-Sherin

Preparing code and data for computationally reproducible collaboration and publication: a hands-on workshop

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Computational analyses are playing an increasingly central role in research. Journals, funders, and researchers are calling for published research to include associated data and code. However, many involved in research have not received training in best practices and tools for sharing code and data. This course aims to address this gap in training while also providing those who support researchers with curated best practices guidance and tools.This course is unique compared to other reproducibility courses due to its practical, step-by-step design. It is comprised of hands-on exercises to prepare research code and data for computationally reproducible publication. Although the course starts with some brief introductory information about computational reproducibility, the bulk of the course is guided work with data and code. Participants move through preparing research for reuse, organization, documentation, automation, and submitting their code and data to share. Tools that support reproducibility will be introduced (Code Ocean), but all lessons will be platform agnostic.Level: IntermediateIntended audience: The course is targeted at researchers and research support staff who are involved in the preparation and publication of research materials. Anyone with an interest in reproducible publication is welcome. The course is especially useful for those looking to learn practical steps for improving the computational reproducibility of their own research.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: April Clyburne-Sherin

SPARC Popular Resources

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SPARC is a global coalition committed to making Open the default for research and education. SPARC empowers people to solve big problems and make new discoveries through the adoption of policies and practices that advance Open Access, Open Data, and Open Education.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Nick Shockey

Ten Simple Rules for the Care and Feeding of Scientific Data

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This article offers a short guide to the steps scientists can take to ensure that their data and associated analyses continue to be of value and to be recognized. In just the past few years, hundreds of scholarly papers and reports have been written on questions of data sharing, data provenance, research reproducibility, licensing, attribution, privacy, and more—but our goal here is not to review that literature. Instead, we present a short guide intended for researchers who want to know why it is important to “care for and feed” data, with some practical advice on how to do that. The final section at the close of this work (Links to Useful Resources) offers links to the types of services referred to throughout the text.

Material Type: Reading

Authors: Alberto Pepe, Aleksandra Slavkovic, Alexander W. Blocker, Alyssa Goodman, Aneta Siemiginowska, Ashish Mahabal, Christine L. Borgman, David W. Hogg, Kyle Cranmer, Margaret Hedstrom, Merce Crosas, Paul Groth, Rosanne Di Stefano, Vinay Kashyap, Yolanda Gil

Preregistration in Complex Contexts: A Preregistration Template for the Application of Cognitive Models

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In recent years, open science practices have become increasingly popular in psychology and related sciences. These practices aim to increase rigour and transparency in science as a potential response to the challenges posed by the replication crisis. Many of these reforms -- including the highly influential preregistration -- have been designed for experimental work that tests simple hypotheses with standard statistical analyses, such as assessing whether an experimental manipulation has an effect on a variable of interest. However, psychology is a diverse field of research, and the somewhat narrow focus of the prevalent discussions surrounding and templates for preregistration has led to debates on how appropriate these reforms are for areas of research with more diverse hypotheses and more complex methods of analysis, such as cognitive modelling research within mathematical psychology. Our article attempts to bridge the gap between open science and mathematical psychology, focusing on the type of cognitive modelling that Crüwell, Stefan, & Evans (2019) labelled model application, where researchers apply a cognitive model as a measurement tool to test hypotheses about parameters of the cognitive model. Specifically, we (1) discuss several potential researcher degrees of freedom within model application, (2) provide the first preregistration template for model application, and (3) provide an example of a preregistered model application using our preregistration template. More broadly, we hope that our discussions and proposals constructively advance the debate surrounding preregistration in cognitive modelling, and provide a guide for how preregistration templates may be developed in other diverse or complex research contexts.

Material Type: Reading

Authors: Nathan Evans, Sophia Crüwell

Project Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research (TIER)

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The Project Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research (TIER) develops methods and tools for enhancing research transparency through teaching. These can be used by faculty who teach quantitative methods or supervise student research. TIER further provides guidance to students who want to adopt transparent and replicable research practices independently.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Curate Science

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Curate Science is a unified curation system and platform to verify that research is transparent and credible. It will allow researchers, journals, universities, funders, teachers, journalists, and the general public to ensure:- Transparency: Ensure research meets minimum transparency standards appropriate to the article type and employed methodologies.- Credibility: Ensure follow-up scrutiny is linked to its parent paper, including critical commentaries, reproducibility/robustness re-analyses, and new sample replications.

Material Type: Data Set

Learning Statistics with R

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The book is associated with the lsr package on CRAN and GitHub. The package is probably okay for many introductory teaching purposes, but some care is required. The package does have some limitations (e.g., the etaSquared function does strange things for unbalanced ANOVA designs), and it has not been updated in a while.

Material Type: Textbook

Author: Danielle Navarro

Reproducible Research: Walking the Walk

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Description This hands-on tutorial will train reproducible research warriors on the practices and tools that make experimental verification possible with an end-to-end data analysis workflow. The tutorial will expose attendees to open science methods during data gathering, storage, analysis, up to publication into a reproducible article. Attendees are expected to have basic familiarity with scientific Python and Git.

Material Type: Module

Author: Matt McCormick

Statcheck

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statcheck is a program that checks for errors in statistical reporting in APA-formatted documents. It was originally written in the R programming language. statcheck/web is a web-based implementation of statcheck. Using statcheck/web, you can check any PDF for statistical errors without installing the R programming language on your computer.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Authors: Michele B. Nuijten, Sacha Epskamp

General Principles of Preclinical Study Design

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Preclinical studies using animals to study the potential of a therapeutic drug or strategy are important steps before translation to clinical trials. However, evidence has shown that poor quality in the design and conduct of these studies has not only impeded clinical translation but also led to significant waste of valuable research resources. It is clear that experimental biases are related to the poor quality seen with preclinical studies. In this chapter, we will focus on hypothesis testing type of preclinical studies and explain general concepts and principles in relation to the design of in vivo experiments, provide definitions of experimental biases and how to avoid them, and discuss major sources contributing to experimental biases and how to mitigate these sources. We will also explore the differences between confirmatory and exploratory studies, and discuss available guidelines on preclinical studies and how to use them. This chapter, together with relevant information in other chapters in the handbook, provides a powerful tool to enhance scientific rigour for preclinical studies without restricting creativity.

Material Type: Reading

Authors: Andrew S. C. Rice, Jan Vollert, Nathalie Percie du Sert, Wenlong Huang

Transparent, Reproducible, and Open Science Practices of Published Literature in Dermatology Journals: Cross-Sectional Analysis

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Background: Reproducible research is a foundational component for scientific advancements, yet little is known regarding the extent of reproducible research within the dermatology literature. Objective: This study aimed to determine the quality and transparency of the literature in dermatology journals by evaluating for the presence of 8 indicators of reproducible and transparent research practices. Methods: By implementing a cross-sectional study design, we conducted an advanced search of publications in dermatology journals from the National Library of Medicine catalog. Our search included articles published between January 1, 2014, and December 31, 2018. After generating a list of eligible dermatology publications, we then searched for full text PDF versions by using Open Access Button, Google Scholar, and PubMed. Publications were analyzed for 8 indicators of reproducibility and transparency—availability of materials, data, analysis scripts, protocol, preregistration, conflict of interest statement, funding statement, and open access—using a pilot-tested Google Form. Results: After exclusion, 127 studies with empirical data were included in our analysis. Certain indicators were more poorly reported than others. We found that most publications (113, 88.9%) did not provide unmodified, raw data used to make computations, 124 (97.6%) failed to make the complete protocol available, and 126 (99.2%) did not include step-by-step analysis scripts. Conclusions: Our sample of studies published in dermatology journals do not appear to include sufficient detail to be accurately and successfully reproduced in their entirety. Solutions to increase the quality, reproducibility, and transparency of dermatology research are warranted. More robust reporting of key methodological details, open data sharing, and stricter standards journals impose on authors regarding disclosure of study materials might help to better the climate of reproducible research in dermatology. [JMIR Dermatol 2019;2(1):e16078]

Material Type: Reading

Authors: Andrew Niemann, Austin L. Johnson, Courtney Cook, Daniel Tritz, J. Michael Anderson, Matt Vassar

Raiders of the lost HARK: a reproducible inference framework for big data science

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Hypothesizing after the results are known (HARK) has been disparaged as data dredging, and safeguards including hypothesis preregistration and statistically rigorous oversight have been recommended. Despite potential drawbacks, HARK has deepened thinking about complex causal processes. Some of the HARK precautions can conflict with the modern reality of researchers’ obligations to use big, ‘organic’ data sources—from high-throughput genomics to social media streams. We here propose a HARK-solid, reproducible inference framework suitable for big data, based on models that represent formalization of hypotheses. Reproducibility is attained by employing two levels of model validation: internal (relative to data collated around hypotheses) and external (independent to the hypotheses used to generate data or to the data used to generate hypotheses). With a model-centered paradigm, the reproducibility focus changes from the ability of others to reproduce both data and specific inferences from a study to the ability to evaluate models as representation of reality. Validation underpins ‘natural selection’ in a knowledge base maintained by the scientific community. The community itself is thereby supported to be more productive in generating and critically evaluating theories that integrate wider, complex systems.

Material Type: Reading

Authors: Iain E. Buchan, James S. Koopman, Jiang Bian, Matthew Sperrin, Mattia Prosperi, Mo Wang