scholarly journals Optimizing the Scientific Study of Suicide with Open and Transparent Research Practices

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Carpenter ◽  
Keyne C. Law

Suicide research is vitally important, yet—like psychology research more broadly—faces methodological challenges. In recent years, researchers have raised concerns about standard practices in psychological research, concerns that apply to suicide research and raise questions about its robustness and validity. In the present paper, we review these concerns and the corresponding solutions put forth by the ‘open science’ community. These include using open science platforms, pre-registering studies, ensuring reproducible analyses, using high-powered studies, ensuring open access to research materials and products, and conducting replication studies. We build upon existing guides, address specific obstacles faced by suicide researchers, and offer a clear set of recommended practices for suicide researchers. In particular, we consider challenges that suicide researchers may face in seeking to adopt ‘open science’ practices (e.g., prioritizing large samples) and suggest possible strategies that the field may use in order to ensure robust and transparent research, despite these challenges.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric R. Louderback ◽  
Sally M Gainsbury ◽  
Robert Heirene ◽  
Karen Amichia ◽  
Alessandra Grossman ◽  
...  

The replication crisis has stimulated researchers around the world to adopt open science research practices intended to reduce publication bias and improve research quality. Open science practices include study pre-registration, open data, open publication, and avoiding methods that can lead to publication bias and low replication rates. Although gambling studies uses similar research methods to behavioral research fields that have struggled with replication, we know little about the uptake of open science research practices in gambling-focused research. We conducted a scoping review of 500 recent (1/1/2016 – 12/1/2019) studies focused on gambling and problem gambling to examine the use of open science and transparent research practices. Our results showed that a small percentage of studies used most practices: whereas 54.6% (95% CI: [50.2, 58.9]) of studies used at least one of nine open science practices, each practice’s prevalence was: 1.6% for pre-registration (95% CI:[0.8, 3.1]), 3.2% for open data (95% CI:[2.0, 5.1]), 0% for open notebook, 35.2% for open access (95% CI:[31.1, 39.5]), 7.8% for open materials (95% CI:[5.8, 10.5]), 1.4% for open code (95% CI:[0.7, 2.9]), and 15.0% for preprint posting (95% CI:[12.1, 18.4]). In all, 6.4% (95% CI:[4.6, 8.9]) used a power analysis and 2.4% (95% CI:[1.4, 4.2]) of the studies were replication studies. Exploratory analyses showed that studies that used any open science practice, and open access in particular, had higher citation counts. We suggest several practical ways to enhance the uptake of open science principles and practices both within gambling studies and in science more broadly.


Author(s):  
Cagtay Fabry ◽  
Andreas Pittner ◽  
Volker Hirthammer ◽  
Michael Rethmeier

AbstractThe increasing adoption of Open Science principles has been a prevalent topic in the welding science community over the last years. Providing access to welding knowledge in the form of complex and complete datasets in addition to peer-reviewed publications can be identified as an important step to promote knowledge exchange and cooperation. There exist previous efforts on building data models specifically for fusion welding applications; however, a common agreed upon implementation that is used by the community is still lacking. One proven approach in other domains has been the use of an openly accessible and agreed upon file and data format used for archiving and sharing domain knowledge in the form of experimental data. Going into a similar direction, the welding community faces particular practical, technical, and also ideological challenges that are discussed in this paper. Collaboratively building upon previous work with modern tools and platforms, the authors motivate, propose, and outline the use of a common file format specifically tailored to the needs of the welding research community as a complement to other already established Open Science practices. Successfully establishing a culture of openly accessible research data has the potential to significantly stimulate progress in welding research.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Kalandadze ◽  
Sara Ann Hart

The increasing adoption of open science practices in the last decade has been changing the scientific landscape across fields. However, developmental science has been relatively slow in adopting open science practices. To address this issue, we followed the format of Crüwell et al., (2019) and created summaries and an annotated list of informative and actionable resources discussing ten topics in developmental science: Open science; Reproducibility and replication; Open data, materials and code; Open access; Preregistration; Registered reports; Replication; Incentives; Collaborative developmental science.This article offers researchers and students in developmental science a starting point for understanding how open science intersects with developmental science. After getting familiarized with this article, the developmental scientist should understand the core tenets of open and reproducible developmental science, and feel motivated to start applying open science practices in their workflow.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Brian A. Eiler ◽  
◽  
Patrick C. Doyle ◽  
Rosemary L. Al-Kire ◽  
Heidi A. Wayment ◽  
...  

This article provides a case study of a student-focused research experience that introduced basic data science skills and their utility for psychological research, providing practical learning experiences for students interested in learning computational social science skills. Skills included programming; acquiring, visualizing, and managing data; performing specialized analyses; and building knowledge about open-science practices.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Cousineau

Born-Open Data experiments are encouraged for better open science practices. To be adopted, Born-Open data practices must be easy to implement. Herein, I introduce a package for E-Prime such that the data files are automatically saved on a GitHub repository. The BornOpenData package for E-Prime works seamlessly and performs the upload as soon as the experiment is finished so that there is no additional steps to perform beyond placing a package call within E-Prime. Because E-Prime files are not standard tab-separated files, I also provide an R function that retrieves the data directly from GitHub into a data frame ready to be analyzed. At this time, there are no standards as to what should constitute an adequate open-access data repository so I propose a few suggestions that any future Born-Open data system could follow for easier use by the research community.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-59
Author(s):  
Alexandra Sarafoglou ◽  
Suzanne Hoogeveen ◽  
Dora Matzke ◽  
Eric-Jan Wagenmakers

The current crisis of confidence in psychological science has spurred on field-wide reforms to enhance transparency, reproducibility, and replicability. To solidify these reforms within the scientific community, student courses on open science practices are essential. Here we describe the content of our Research Master course “Good Research Practices” which we have designed and taught at the University of Amsterdam. Supported by Chambers’ recent book The 7 Deadly Sins of Psychology, the course covered topics such as QRPs, the importance of direct and conceptual replication studies, preregistration, and the public sharing of data, code, and analysis plans. We adopted a pedagogical approach that: (a) reduced teacher-centered lectures to a minimum; (b) emphasized practical training on open science practices; and (c) encouraged students to engage in the ongoing discussions in the open science community on social media platforms.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olmo Van den Akker ◽  
Laura Danielle Scherer ◽  
Jelte M. Wicherts ◽  
Sander Koole

So-called “open science practices” seek to improve research transparency and methodological rigor. What do emotion researchers think about these practices? To address this question, we surveyed active emotion researchers (N= 144) in October 2019 about their attitudes toward several open science practices. Overall, the majority of emotion researchers had positive attitudes toward open science practices and expressed a willingness to engage in such practices. Emotion researchers on average believed that replicability would improve by publishing more negative findings, by requiring open data and materials, and by conducting studies with larger sample sizes. Direct replications, multi-lab studies, and preregistration were all seen as beneficial to the replicability of emotion research. Emotion researchers believed that more direct replications would be conducted if replication studies would receive increased funding, more citations, and easier publication in high impact journals. Emotion researchers believed that preregistration would be stimulated by providing researchers with more information about its benefits and more guidance on its effective application. Overall, these findings point to considerable momentum with regard to open science among emotion researchers. This momentum may be leveraged to achieve a more robust emotion science.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Karoune

This is a dataset gathered to assess the state of open science practices in phytolith research. All articles presenting primary phytolith data were extracted from 16 prominent archaeological and palaeoecological journals between 2009 and 2018. In total, the dataset contains information on 341 articles. This included archaeological (n=214), palaeoenvironmental (n=53) and methodological (n=74) studies. Information was recorded regarding the data location and what type of data was included in the text and as supplementary files. There was also data recorded in relation to open access, picture inclusion, use of the International code for Phytolith Nomenclature (ICPN) and the inclusion of a full method.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Andrew Smith ◽  
Jonas Sandbrink

The proliferation of open science may inadvertently increase the chance of deliberate or accidental misuse of research. Here, we examine the interaction between open science practices and biosecurity and biosafety to identify risks and opportunities for risk mitigation. We argue that open data, code, and materials may increase risks from research with misuse potential, despite their general importance. For instance, increased access to protocols, datasets, and computational methods for viral engineering may increase the risk of release of enhanced pathogens. For this dangerous subset of research, both open science and biosecurity goals may be achieved by using access-controlled repositories or application programming interfaces. The increased use of preprints could challenge any strategy for risk mitigation that relies on assessment at the publication stage, emphasising the need for earlier oversight in the research lifecycle. Preregistration of research, a practice promoted by the open science community, provides an opportunity for achieving biosecurity risk assessment at the conception of research. Open science and biosecurity experts have an important role to play in enabling responsible research with maximal societal benefit.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Hoogeveen ◽  
Michiel van Elk

The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) is a relatively young but prolific field that has offered compelling insights into religious minds and practices. However, many empirical findings within this field are still preliminary and their reliability remains to be determined. In this paper, we first argue that it is crucial to critically evaluate the CSR literature and adopt open science practices and replication research in particular to move the field forward. Second, we highlight the outcomes of previous replications and make suggestions for future replication studies in the CSR, with a particular focus on neuroscience, developmental psychology, and qualitative research. Finally, we provide a ‘replication script’ with advice on how to select, conduct, and organize replication research. Our approach is illustrated with a ‘glimpse behind the scenes’ of the recently launched Cross-Cultural Religious Replication Project, in the hope of inspiring scholars of religion to embrace open science and replication in their own research.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document