Reading focus
Syllabus: How Can Psychological Science Become More Reliable?
Separate a working data link, usable documentation and recovered numerical results.
Why you’re reading it. Translate transparency into concrete conditions for inspection.
A question to consider. What would you add to a study archive if another researcher could open its files but could not reconstruct the reported exclusions?
Why this reading
A data link is a starting point for inspection. Hardwicke and colleagues examine a journal policy change, then attempt to recover reported numerical results. The two investigations separate data availability, usability and analytic reproducibility.
Before you read
Here, analytic reproducibility means obtaining reported results from existing data and specified analyses. It differs from collecting new observations. Files can be accessible yet incomplete or difficult to interpret.
Read for
- Trace the pre/post-policy comparison and its limits as evidence of causation.
- Identify how articles and outcomes entered the reproduction checks.
- Compare problems resolved through author assistance with those that remained, and consider their substantive importance.
Consider afterwards
- A repository contains data and code, but a reader cannot reconstruct an exclusion decision. What documentation would make the claim inspectable?
Editorial context
The policy comparison concerns one journal. The reproduction sample was restricted to selected, relatively straightforward outcomes with apparently reusable data. Numerical discrepancies did not clearly overturn substantive conclusions; these findings are not a failure rate for all psychology.