Berkeley Initiative for
Transparency in the Social Sciences

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…

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…

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…

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…

Introduction from BITSS: Today on the BITSS blog, BITSS Communications Intern Brian Lee announces a new NIA grant that invests in open science and transparency efforts across the social sciences.  One of the biggest barriers to the widespread adoption of research transparency tools and practices—and ultimately the credibility of social science research—is…

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…

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…

By Aleksandar Bogdanoski. This post is also posted on the CEGA blog. We share insights from a recent article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), co-authored by CEGA/BITSS Faculty Co-Director Ted Miguel and several members of the BITSS community. The article discusses how researchers, funders, journal editors, and others can…

By Esra Ataman, Ozan Can Çağlar, and Bilal Kırkıcı Introduction from BITSS: In this post, Esra Ataman, Bilal Kirkici, and Ozan Can Çağlar reflect on their project supported by one of our 2020 Catalyst grants, which involved developing an open science module for their graduate course “Quantitative Research Methods and Ethics in…

Introduction from BITSS: In addition to being synonymous with research transparency and reproducibility, open science is also about building communities centered around collaboration and the exchange of knowledge. In this post, Catalysts Amanda Domingos and Rodrigo Lins share their experience establishing and leading Métodos em Pauta [Methods on the Agenda], a student-led…

By Katie Hoeberling, Senior Program Manager The Social Science Prediction Platform (SSPP) allows researchers to systematically collect predictions about the results of research, as discussed in this post from last July. When faced with important questions and scarce resources, policymakers and practitioners rely on research and expert perspectives to make decisions (often…

An illustration of how the policy community can use OPA to strengthen the evidence-to-policy link.  By Fernando Hoces de la Guardia What is the deworming OPA? Opacity in policy analysis presents barriers to applying rigorously generated evidence to novel settings. Open Policy Analysis (OPA) is a framework to improve the transparency and…

By Katie Hoeberling and Aleksandar Bogdanoski We look forward each year to the BITSS Annual Meeting as a space for discussing new meta-research and open science initiatives, as well as for reuniting with old colleagues and welcoming new ones, normally with handshakes and hugs. This year has been anything but normal, though.…

By Chris Hartgerink (Liberate Science, GmbH) Introduction from BITSS: BITSS launched MetaArXiv (formerly BITSS Preprints) in 2017 as a preprint service where researchers could share and discover work focused on improving research transparency and reproducibility and other meta-scientific research. We recently teamed up with the Peer Community in (PCI) Meta-Research to give MetaArXiv…

By Aleksandar Bogdanoski (BITSS Senior Program Associate) and Katie Hoeberling (BITSS Program Manager). This post is also published on the Development Impact blog and the CEGA blog. What will be the effect of raising the minimum wage by $2 an hour? How will cash transfers impact local prices in rural Kenya? Will…

By Aleksandar Bogdanoski, Katie Hoeberling, and Fernando Hoces de la Guardia This post is also published on the CEGA blog. The COVID-19 pandemic has arguably had a more profound impact on scientific research than any other phenomenon in recent history; between January and May this year, over 23,000 research papers were written…

by Hardy Schwamm (NUI Galway) and Elaine Toomey (University of Limerick/Cochrane Ireland)  Introduction from BITSS: In what is becoming an annual event, the Open Science Community Galway at the National University of Ireland Galway (NUI Galway) hosted Open Scholarship Week 2020, featuring a series of workshops, seminars, and presentations dedicated to transparent,…

By Aleksandar Bogdanoski and Katie Hoeberling Each year we look forward to our Annual Meeting as a space for showcasing new meta-research and discussing progress in the movement for research transparency. These meetings offer snapshots of the evolving priorities and challenges faced by the scientific community working to change research norms. BITSS’s…

Introduction from BITSS: Open data has many benefits. It can foster collaboration, facilitate more complete meta-analysis, and improve the visibility of related research outputs. At the same time, we know that re-identification can cause real risks to study participants and that balancing openness with such risks is a delicate and often difficult…

Development economists, by and large, are driven to inform effective policy by generating rigorous and credible evidence. So in the face of failures to replicate findings, as well as evidence of pervasive publication bias across the social sciences, it’s no surprise that work to increase research transparency and reproducibility is underway in…

By Isabelle Cohen and Hagit Caspi A note from BITSS: Recently, we announced the official release of a new textbook, “Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research: How to do open science,” by Garret Christensen, Jeremy Freese, and BITSS Faculty Director Ted Miguel. As the first textbook with a comprehensive overview of the…

By Keesler Welch, Senior Research Associate (Trial Registry), J-PAL Global, and James Turitto, Senior Research Manager, J-PAL Global. This post was originally published here on the J-PAL Blog. J-PAL and the American Economic Association (AEA) have been working together over the past year to create digital object identifiers, or DOIs, for each…

It’s been nearly 15 years since John Ioannidis’s “Why Most Published Research Findings are False” was published, turning the scientific community on its head. Today you might think little had changed. Just type “science is broken” into your online search engine, and you’ll find dozens of recent articles, blog posts, videos, and…

By Andrew Foster (Brown University), Dean Karlan (Northwestern University), Edward Miguel (UC Berkeley) and Aleksandar Bogdanoski (BITSS) This post was originally posted on the Development Impact blog. BITSS has been working with the Journal of Development Economics (JDE) to introduce Pre-results Review (also referred to as “registered reports” in other disciplines) as…

DeclareDesign is a set of software packages for planning for and assessing research designs, written by Graeme Blair, Jasper Cooper, Alexander Coppock, and Macartan Humphreys. The software is based on the Model-Inquiry-Data Strategy-Answer Strategy (MIDA) framework for declaring and diagnosing research designs introduced in their paper forthcoming at the American Political Science Review. In…

Guest announcement by Christina Bergmann and Sho Tsuji (MetaLab) The MetaLab challenge calling for meta-analyses on cognitive development, with support from Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), has closed. We received data for 7 meta-analyses, which will be added to MetaLab in the coming months. The winners are three…

By: Kelsey Mulcahy, BITSS Program Manager The 2017 Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) moved beyond the credibility crisis in social science research to discuss potential solutions. The two-day event featured a workshop, two panel discussions, an award ceremony for the 2017 Leamer-Rosenthal Prize Recipients,…

“I didn’t do my work for money or prizes – but for the excitement of discovery” – Edmund Phelps (Economist) BITSS recently announced the 2017 Leamer-Rosenthal Prize Recipients. The eight recipients, as well as the larger pool of nominees, are part of a growing movement in social science to practice better science,…

Launching BITSS Preprints, an interdisciplinary archive of articles focused on improving research transparency and reproducibility. During the BITSS Annual Meeting in December 2016, several researchers approached us about launching a new Working Paper series. The reason was simple – a common challenge faced by leaders and soon-to-be-leaders in the research transparency and…

The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) is pleased to announce the recipients of our first round of competitively selected Catalyst grants![1] Over the next year, 12 BITSS Catalysts will carry out 8 projects in 10 countries, holding conferences, workshops, and summer schools, and developing curriculum for both traditional…