The replication crisis in economics – and how we might answer it

On September 8, 2017 the ZBW Leibniz Information Center for Economics hosted the workshop “Replications in Empirical Economics – Ways out of the Crisis” at the Annual Conference of the Verein für Socialpolitik in Vienna, Austria. Thirty participants and four speakers engaged in lively and stimulating discussions about replications and the publication of replications in Economics.

This is a cross-post of the weblog of the replication network. Read the rest of this entry »

American Economic Review publishes AEA’s Session Papers on Replication

Two weeks ago, the American Economic Review published the ‘Papers and Proceedings‘ of the 129th annual meeting of the American Economic Association (AEA) held in January, 2017.

At this year’s meeting, one session was dedicated to the topic of ‘Replication in Microeconomics‘ while another focussed on ‘Replication and Ethics in Economics: Thirty Years after Dewald, Thursby, and Anderson“.

In both sessions, very interesting and excellent papers were presented.

Below, I list all presentations of these sessions and the corresponding links to the papers (if available): Read the rest of this entry »

EDaWaX: Final spurt

Slowly but steady, the EDaWaX project draws to a close. For me a good point in time to outline some of the final steps of our project.

First of all, we are very much engaged in transforming EDaWaX from a project to a regular service for scholarly journals in economic sciences. Therefore we still have a lot of work to do: There are still some issues to solve on the level of software engineering. Currently we are also in the process of improving some of the application’s features and to update the documentation. Nevertheless the software for journals in economics and business research already is available. Starting in the next months we will offer our service (a publication-related data archive) free of charge for editorial offices.

Second, we will present some rescent results of the project at national and international conferences, in roadshows and on annual meetings of learned societies in economics and business studies.

This program starts in two weeks in Munich, where we will disucss the topic of managing research data with the editors of journals in business research and present our software solution at the annual meeting of the German Association for Business Research (VHB), the German learned society for business studies. Read the rest of this entry »

How scientific infrastructure providers currently support RDM in the social sciences

Though some months have passed, again I would like to draw our reader’s attention on a workshop that took already place in June in London. Organised by nereus, the European network of leading social science libraries, the workshop “Open Data, Restricted Data and the Library Role – Practical Cases in Economics and Social Sciences” featured presentations from several notable institutions who discussed their experiences of establishing research data management and RDM services. These presentations highlighted the various demands researchers face in this area and also the role(s) especially libraries can play in the administration or management of open and restricted research data.

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EDaWaX: New research paper published

We are happpy to announce that our new peer-reviewed research paper “Data Policies and Data Archives: A New Paradigm for Academic Publishing in Economic Sciences?” has just been published in the Conference Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ELPUB15). The paper summarises some results of a broader analyses on data policies of journals in economics and business studies.

In our paper we summarise the findings of an empirical study in which a sample of 346 journals in economics and business studies were examined. We regard both the extent and the quality of journals’ data policies, which should facilitate replications of published empirical research. The paper presents some characteristics of journals equipped with data policies and gives some recommendations for suitable data policies in economics and business sciences journals. In addition, we also evaluate the journals’ data archives to roughly estimate whether these journals really enforce data availability. Our key finding is that we are currently not able to determine a new publishing paradigm for journals in economic sciences.

I would like to thank the reviewers and the organisers of the conference for their useful comments! The full paper is available here.

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Save the date: Workshop “Open data, restricted data and the role of libraries”

NEREUS – a network of European libraries in Economics and Social Sciences –  is happy to announce a pre-conference workshop (2015-6-23 in London) at this year’s LIBER-Conference.

Open Science and open data have become hot topics in recent years. Effective research data management is more and more postulated by research funders. Research infrastructure providers worldwide are busy building up various services and tools for researchers to support them within their research and the management of research data. But how successful are these approaches and their impact in supporting research? How open could or should data be and which role(s) libraries can play to support researchers effectively? Read the rest of this entry »

Report of the 1st national RDA Germany Meeting is online

On November 20/21 the first national RDA Meeting Germany was held in Potsdam. More than 100 participants followed the presentations and discussions. One aim of the meeting was to inform interested people and institutions about RDA’s activities.

On the first day of the conference there were many presentations to inform about the results RDA has yet archived as well as the governance structure that has been defined for RDA. In addition, some perspectives for the future work of the RDA-IGs and WGs have been discussed. Read the rest of this entry »

EDaWaX: State of affairs

As you might have noticed, currently I don’t have much time to publish new articles on the blog. The reason is that our project is currently publishing a lot of the results we achieved in the course of the last two years.

One of these publications has been published yesterday – it is a nice summary of the project’s main results, but still not all of them. The paper “Replizierbare Forschung in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften erhöhen – Eine Herausforderung für wissenschaftliche Infrastrukturdienstleister” is available online. Read the rest of this entry »

EDaWaX presents its work in Washington D.C. and Cambridge in December

The end of the year is coming nearer – for our project it will be an interesting year-end closing, because we’ll be on site at two very interesting meetings:

First at December 11 – 12, we’ll be in Washington D.C., USA, where we’re presenting some results of our research project in a session of the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Fall 2012 Membership Meeting.

A few days later we’ll present our project at the First Open Economics International Workshop in Cambridge, UK, hosted by the Open Economics Working Group.

# Update: 2012-12-10: Bad news: Because of heavy snowfalls in Germany may flights were canceled. Unfortunately this also applied to our flight to Washington DC – so we’ll not be able to attend the CNI Membership Meeting.

Photo: Gianfranco Chicco | flickr.com

EDaWaX: First paper published! #Update

I am happy to announce that some of the results we obtained in our analyses have been published in the proceedings of the WissKom2012 conference (pp.29 ff).

In the research paper for Wisskom2012 Olaf Siegert and I summarized some of the findings of the EDaWaX project.  Unfortunately the paper is available in German only, but I promise to publish some more of our major findings in English – eighter on this blog or in a seperate paper. Some results of our analyses are already published here: ( |1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | )

The presentation I gave in Jülich is available in the download section of the blog.

I also wrote a paper in English that has already been accepted by a peer-reviewed journal. I hope to find time to rework the article and to integrate the very helpful notes and comments of the reviewers anytime soon.

I’ll come back to you, when I’ve got news.

# Update 2012-11-14 #

A slightly updated version of the paper is also available now. It has been published in Working Paper Series of the German Data Forum (RatSWD), No. 210. The RatSWD Working Papers series was launched at the end of 2007. Since 2009, the series has been publishing exclusively conceptual and historical works dealing with the organization of the German statistical infrastructure and research infrastructure in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences.

Data Policies in Open Access Journals: Not all that glitters is “gold”

At the end of September, I was in beautifull Vienna for some days and presented a few results of our project at the 6th Open Access Days in a session about “Making Research Data publicly available: opportunities and challenges“.
It’s been a very nice conference – and some blogposts [Uli Herb -> telepolis (in German) | Astrid Recker -> admtic (in English)] report on the conference and some of the presentations. My colleques Olaf Siegert, Ralf Flohr and I also wrote a summary of the conference for ZfBB (in German) that will be published in the next issue of the journal.

Well, to come back to my talk:  In this post I want to point out some single aspects of my presentation: the availability of data policies in economic scholarly journals that are published open access.
Our project compared the number and quality of data policies we found in a sample of 43 open access Journals to a sample of 141 traditional subscription journals in regard to the implementation of data availability policies.

Generally speaking I wondered how open access journals acquit themselves in this context. Prior to starting our analysis I was quite sure that the percentage of journals equipped with a data availability policy would be higher in open access journals than the proportion of subscription journals equipped with such a policy. I even thought that open access journals could have a comparative advantage to traditional subscription journals: Read the rest of this entry »

German Bibliothekartag: EDaWaX presents first Findings

On Thursday -24th of may- I presented first findings of our research project in a session on research data at the 101st German Bibliothekartag, managed by Goportis, the Leibniz Library Network for Research Information. Up to 100 colleques heard the presentation and some interesting questions were raised.

For introducing my presentation I gave a short overview on the project’s aims and our three project phases. Also the expected outcome and our project partners were introduced.

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EDaWaX-Project wins LIBER Award for Library Innovation 2012

At the end of last week I received an E-Mail from the LIBER Executive Director that congratulates our project for winning the LIBER Award for Library Innovation 2012! These are really great news!

Our abstract:  “Data Management in Scholarly Journals and Possible Roles for Libraries – Some Insights from EDaWaX” was among the top three papers that were submitted to the conference.

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EDaWaX presents progress of the project at the Bibliothekartag 2012 in Hamburg

Those of you attending the German Bibliothekartag in Hamburg (22 – 25 May 2012) should be aware of an interesting session on research data management and add it to your personal conference program:

On May 24 there will be a session on “new structures and demands in scientific libraries – research data management in the Leibniz Library Network for Research Information.” In this session Goportis, the Leibniz Library Network for Research Information, is presenting some of its projects on RDM.

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