Dr. Richard Ball and Norm Medeiros, "Documenting Quantitative Research for Transparency and Reproducibility: Principles and Standards" (IU Workshop in Methods, January 26, 2018)

This talk will present a set of standards for the replication documentation (data, code, and supporting information) that authors should assemble and make public when they release studies reporting the results of research based on analysis of statistical data.  We will begin from first principles:  What purposes is replication documentation intended to serve?  And what must be true of the contents and organization of the documentation for a study if it is to fulfill those purposes?  We will then describe how these general principles are embodied in the particular documentation standards we propose.  Further discussion will include: (i) a comparison of our proposed standards with existing guidelines, such as TOPS, DA-RT, the BITSS Manual, and the "data policies" that have been adopted by a number of prominent journals, (ii) using the Open Science Framework (OSF), an on-line file management platform, for assembling and sharing replication documentation, and (iii) the curricular resources that are being produced by Project TIER for teaching and learning reproducible research methods.

Richard Ball is Professor of Economics at Haverford College.  His primary teaching areas are game theory and statistical methods, and he supervises several senior theses every year.  His research has included theoretical papers on political economy and empirical work on development and social issues. He earned his B.A. at Williams College (self-designed major in cultural anthropology and African studies); his M.S. at Michigan State University (agricultural economics); and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley (agricultural and resource economics). Richard has studied or worked in Sierra Leone, Chad, Egypt and Côte d'Ivoire.

Norm Medeiros is Associate Librarian at Haverford College (PA) where he oversees the collection management and metadata services division of the Libraries. Norm has been active in the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) for many years, serving as its president for the 2015-2016 term. He has been co-Director of Project TIER (www.projecttier.org) with Richard Ball since they launched the initiative in 2013.