Analysis of Open Data and Computational Reproducibility in Registered Reports in Psychology

Ongoing technological developments have made it easier than ever before for scientists to share their data, materials, and analysis code. Sharing data and analysis code makes it easier for other researchers to re-use or check published research. These benefits will only emerge if researchers can reproduce the analysis reported in published articles, and if data is annotated well enough so that it is clear what all variables mean. Because most researchers have not been trained in computational reproducibility, it is important to evaluate current practices to identify practices that can be improved. We examined data and code sharing, as well as computational reproducibility of the main results without contacting the original authors, for Registered Reports published in the in psychological literature between 2014 and 2018. Of the 62 articles that met our inclusion criteria data was available for 40 articles, and analysis scripts for 43 articles. For the 35 articles that shared both data and code and performed analyses in SPSS, R, or JASP, we could run the scripts for 30 articles, and reproduce the main results for 19 articles. Although the percentage of articles that shared both data and code (61%) and articles that could be computationally reproduced (54%) was relatively high compared to other studies, there is clear room for improvement. We provide practices recommendations based on our observations, and link to examples of good research practices in the papers we reproduced.