The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) is excited to announce the recipients of our 2024 round of competitively selected Catalyst grants. From January–June 2024, 8 Catalysts will carry out projects across 8 countries, ranging from holding research transparency trainings, translating materials into different languages and with added cultural competence, to developing new statistical programming software code to facilitate reproducibility. The BITSS Catalyst Program formalizes a network of professionals to advance the teaching, practice, funding, and publishing ..read more

Credit: Einstein Stiftung Berlin/Sebastian Semmer “We know that institutions matter: They transform the [scientific] dedication of individuals to the next generation,” remarked representatives of the Einstein Foundation Berlin as they awarded the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research to BITSS on March 14. The award recognizes individual researchers, institutions, and early career researchers whose work helps to improve the quality and advance the robustness, reliability, and transparency of research. BITSS Faculty Co-Director and Professor of Economics at the University ..read more

Research shows that women are less likely to point out and penalize mistakes in science, and publish fewer comments and failed replications in scientific journals. What does this mean for the social sciences? BITSS Program Manager Grace Han interviews David Klinowski (Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business) about his forthcoming publication, “Voicing Disagreement in Science: Missing Women.” Credit: Suad Kamardeen via Unsplash What does it mean for the state of social science when half of all published studies fail to replicate? A recent&nb ..read more

Edward Miguel, BITSS Faculty Director and Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, and Carson Christiano, Executive Director of the Center for Effective Action (CEGA), participated in a zoom call last month for winners of the 2023 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. During the call, the Miguel and Christiano, along with the other awardees, discussed the ongoing challenges in promoting research quality and outlined their plans to address them with the support of the award. Watch the conversation above ..read more

BITSS is thrilled to share that it has received the 2023 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research in the Institutional category. The Einstein Foundation Berlin made the announcement in a statement on November 14, 2023. This annual award recognizes individual researchers, institutions, and early career researchers whose work helps to improve the quality and advance the robustness, reliability, and transparency of research.  BITSS won the award, in part, for its active role in the “credibility revolution” in science, through which it promotes careful experimentation and ..read more

The authors, Anna Josephson and Jeffrey Michler, credit BITSS textbook Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research for launching their research ethics journey. (Note: this post is co-published with CEGA.) Acknowledging the surplus of data collected and analyzed by economists and social sciences researchers and the speed at which results are disseminated, Anna Josephson and Jeffrey Michler, Agricultural and Resource Economics professors at the University of Arizona, have a forthcoming book that identifies and offers solutions to the ethical issues that often arise throughout ..read more

Introduction from BITSS: In this post, Catalyst Ann Furbush shares her experience from her training project and discusses how open science tools and practices can be adopted in professional settings outside of academic research. Enjoy the read! Open science practices are not universally adopted in the social sciences and are often not included in graduate-level curricula, despite the potential for pre-specification and reproducibility practices to enhance credibility in both academic and professional research. In the professional space, these standards are even less common than in academic set ..read more

Introduction from BITSS: Today on the BITSS blog, Thomas Brailey shares takeaways from his Catalyst training project which involved onboarding in reproducible workflows for members of the J-PAL Payments and Governance Research Program. Check out the training materials developed as part of the project and read on to learn more! Holding all else equal, ensuring a reproducible and transparent research pipeline is more straightforward with fewer team members. When we discuss achieving reproducible social science in the abstract, there are four broad steps that need clear documentation: 1) obt ..read more

by Coly Elhai, Dominic Russel, Jun Wong Introduction from BITSS: Today on the BITSS blog, Coly Elhai, Dominic Russel, and Jun Wong reflect on their Catalyst training project entitled “Transparency and Equity in Pre-Doctoral Research,” which featured a large online workshop on research transparency for pre-doctoral economics students. Full-time pre-doctoral research experiences are now common for incoming Ph.D. students in economics and related fields. In the top fifty economics Ph.D. programs in the US, for example, around forty percent of Americans who went on the job market in 2016-17 had fu ..read more

by Abel Brodeur Introduction from BITSS: Today on the BITSS blog, Catalyst Abel Brodeur presents the Institute for Replication (I4R) (Twitter: @I4Replication), a new initiative for improving the credibility of published research. Read on to learn about I4R’s goals, its connections to the Social Science Reproduction Platform, and how to get involved. Replication is key to credibility and confidence in research findings. Through their attempt to falsify past evidence, replications contribute in essential ways to the production of scientific knowledge. They allow us to assess which findings are r ..read more