New comment in Nature Human Behavior with my former bachelor student Eline Ensinck: "Make abandoned research publicly available". We argue it is time to be honest about the content of our file drawers, and the varied reasons studies remain unshared. nature.com/articles/s41562-0… >

Feb 7, 2024 · 12:38 PM UTC

6
112
14
358
As we do not have a subscription to NHB, I've shared a preprint here: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/3b… This comment is inspired by reflections from performing our study "An Inception Cohort Study Quantifying How Many Registered Studies are Published": psyarxiv.com/5hkjz/

An Inception Cohort Study Quantifying How Many Registered Studies are Published

We quantified how many studies registered on the Open Science Framework (OSF) up to November 2017 are performed but not shared after at least 4 years. Examining a sample of 315 registrations, of...

osf.io
1
3
1
13
TL:DR: If we feel too ashamed to open up about the research in our file drawers, how can we ever hope to improve the way we do science? There are many benign reasons to not share work - if we were more honest about these, we could learn how to prevent research waste.
15
Replying to @lakens
This is a great idea, but I feel that -- at least in economics -- we do this already through working paper repositories.
1
1
Very nice! Do those contain all work done? We have preprints but as our cited paper in the comment shows, people do not actually take the effort to write up some work.
1
more replies
Replying to @lakens
The only argument that would make sense against the reasonable request of "more" is if the projects were abandoned at random, which obviously doesn't hold
1
Replying to @lakens
Thanks! Is it cool to just make them pre-prints? E.g., the ones that were R&R (so already manuscripts) but never resubmitted bc of the "Bus" = 1 problem (not bc of skills, just bandwidth prob when ppl graduate).
1
Replying to @lakens
How happy I would have been with this when I was working on my PhD! Visited my hero Seymour Rosenberg at Rutgers, told him about my idea/work and he said: great idea we tried that, didn’t work. But but where’s your paper about it? I asked. In some drawer somewhere he said.
1
6