There is growing interest in enhancing research transparency and reproducibility in economics and other scientific fields. We survey existing work on these topics within economics, and discuss the evidence suggesting that publication bias, inability to replicate, and specification searching remain widespread in the discipline. We next discuss recent progress in this area, including through improved research design, study registration and pre-analysis plans, disclosure standards, and open sharing of data and materials, drawing on experiences in both economics and other social sciences. We discuss areas where consensus is emerging on new practices, as well as approaches that remain controversial, and speculate about the most effective ways to make economics research more credible in the future.

Jupyter notebooks provide a useful environment for interactive exploration of data. A common question I get, though, is how you can progress from this nonlinear, interactive, trial-and-error style of exploration to a more linear and reproducible analysis based on organized, packaged, and tested code. This series of videos presents a case study in how I personally approach reproducible data analysis within the Jupyter notebook.

When people talk about their data infrastructure, they tend to focus on the technologies: Hadoop, Scalding, Impala, and the like. However, we’ve found that just as important as the technologies themselves are the principles that guide their use. We’d like to share our experience with one such principle that we’ve found particularly useful: reproducibility. We’ll talk about our motivation for focusing on reproducibility, how we’re using Jupyter Notebooks as our core tool, and the workflow we’ve developed around Jupyter to operationalize our approach.

As part of this project, in collaboration with Philippe Bonnet, we are using (and extending) our infrastructure to support the SIGMOD Repeatability effort. Below are some case studies that illustrate how authors can create provenance-rich and reproducible papers, and how reviewers can both reproduce the experiments and perform workability tests: packaging an experiment on a distributed database system (link in title).