Improving Social Science: Lessons from the Open Science Movement | PS: Political Science & Politics

Recent years have been times of turmoil for psychological science. Depending on whom you ask, the field underwent a “replication crisis” (Shrout and Rodgers 2018) or a “credibility revolution” (Vazire 2018) that might even climax in “psychology’s renaissance” (Nelson, Simmons, and Simonsohn 2018). This article asks what social scientists can learn from this story. Our take-home message is that although differences in research practices make it difficult to prescribe cures across disciplines, much still can be learned from interdisciplinary exchange. We provide nine lessons but first summarize psychology’s experience and what sets it apart from neighboring disciplines.

As a sociologist and a psychologist, we are outsiders to political science. What unites us is an interest in meta-scientific questions that has made us wonder how disciplines beyond psychology can benefit from increased transparency. Whereas we aim to address social scientists in general, our perspective is that of quantitative research. We focus on the practices of open data, open materials, and preregistration. These often are thought of as means to improve the credibility of research—for example, through increasing reproducibility (i.e., ensuring that a reanalysis of the same data results in the same conclusions) and/or replicability (i.e., ensuring that an empirical replication of a study leads to the same conclusions). Of course, open science also encompasses other practices such as open access publication and open educational resources, with a broad range of underlying goals, including increased accessibility and reduced inequalities.