Transparency in an Era of Data-Driven Policy: The Importance of Reproducible Research

The capacity for data-driven research in the social sciences continues to grow, and policymakers frequently look to that research when doing their work. A new Policy Spotlight from the University of Illinois System’s Institute of Government and Public Affairs offers a roadmap for increasing transparency around data and ensuring such studies can be replicated.

Advances in digital storage and computer processing have opened the door to more highly sophisticated research projects, which often include large, complicated datasets. The results of these studies are written in papers and reviewed before being published in a peer-reviewed journal. However, the computer code and datasets used to produce the results are rarely examined, and many journals do not make the code and data publicly available. This makes it difficult for such studies to be replicated.  The authors of this Policy Spotlight use one of their published studies as an example of how researchers can establish reproducibility in their scholarship.