Academics and scientists, especially those in administrative positions looking to rate their peers/staff/candidates, have traditionally used impact factors as an indicator of quality and influence. Only the best, most trustworthy and innovative research gets published in journals with high impact factors. At least, that is what they would like us to believe… What is an impact factor? The impact factor
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The pressure to publish and current incentives that reward highly-cited discoveries leads to research findings that are not reproducible and inadvertently results in the natural selection of bad science. It is difficult to encourage scientists to take effort in conducting reproducible and rigorous research without better incentives. What kinds of metrics and incentives might reward scientists for conducting sound science?
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In a previous post, we profiled the EQUATOR network and reporting guidelines. These guidelines stress transparency in reporting study methods, and most are relevant to study designs in clinical research, such as randomised controlled trials, epidemiological studies and systematic reviews. Taking a different vein, the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines were developed to enhance transparency in reporting of study
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In the previous post we learned how to create a project folder and pre-register a study protocol on the Open Science Framework (OSF). The OSF also serves as a good data repository to store data, and users can add contributors (i.e. collaborators) to projects. How is this done? To add files to a project, navigate to the OSF website, sign
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Pre-registration of study protocols increases research transparency by providing a time-stamped record of experimental or analysis decisions before studies are conducted. Protocol pre-registration is now mandatory or strongly encouraged for clinical trials, and is increasingly encouraged for basic science and pre-clinical research (e.g. see the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines). The Open Science Framework (OSF) is an open source software
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Researchers are increasingly encouraged to implement reproducible research practices in their work. These practices include describing the data collected and used for analysis in detail, clearly reporting the analysis method and results, and sharing the dataset and statistical or analysis code. To determine how well reproducible research practices are implemented, Page and colleagues (2017) investigated their implementation in systematic reviews
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