In light of the ongoing ‘reproducibility crisis’ across the disciplines of the medical and social sciences, there is increased pressure on scholars to engage in research practices that are ‘open’ meaning transparent, verifiable, and reproducible.
As a response to this challenge, Thomas Leeper (LSE) and I have created a new course that aims to to develop the perspectives, knowledge, and skills needed by researchers to make their research more open.
What does the course cover?
The course will be very ‘hands on’ and will teach the following skills:
- Conducting systematic, efficient and reproducible literature reviews;
- Creating pre-analysis plans and pre-registering new studies;
- Maintaining open workflows and using Github for version control;
- Using dynamic documents and reporting all results using widely accepted standards.
Who should attend?
This course will be most relevant to:
- Researchers and graduate students;
- With no or limited prior experience of reproducible research methods;
- Committed to adopt these tools/methods soon after the activity;
- With demonstrated experience in conducting empirical research;
- With demonstrated experience in analysing quantitative data (regressions);
- With a good grasp of the social science literature (economics, political science, psychology, sociology, social work, etc.) or the public health literature (epidemiology, clinical trials, etc.).
When and where?
The course will be taught at the following summer schools:
- Essex Summer School (Colchester, UK), from 31 July to 4 August 2017. For more information and registration, please go to this page.
- Utrecht Summer School (Utrecht, Netherlands), from 14 to 18 August 2017. For more information and registration, please go to to this page.
- LSE Methods Summer Programme (London, UK), from 21 to 25 August 2017. For more information and registration, please go to this page.
Acknowledgement
The development of this curriculum was funded by the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) Catalyst Program. For more information, please visit www.bitss.org, sign up for the BITSS blog, and follow BITSS on Twitter @UCBITSS.
