About
The Social Science Reproduction Platform (SSRP) is an openly licensed platform that facilitates the sourcing, cataloging, and review of attempts to verify and improve the computational reproducibility of social science research. Computational reproducibility is the ability to reproduce the results, tables, and other figures found in research articles using the data, code, and materials made available by the authors. The SSRP is meant to be used in combination with the Guide for Accelerating Computational Reproducibility (ACRe Guide), a protocol that includes detailed steps and criteria for assessing and improving reproducibility.
Assessments of reproducibility often gravitate towards binary judgments that declare entire papers as “reproducible” or “not reproducible”. The SSRP allows for a more nuanced approach to reproducibility, where reproducers analyze individual claims and their associated display items, and take concrete steps to improve their reproducibility. SSRP reproductions are transparent and reproducible in themselves since they are based on the ACRe Guide’s standardized reproduction protocol and publicly document their analyses to allow for collaboration, discussion, and reuse. Sign up for a free account now to get started in improving computational reproducibility—one claim at a time!
SSRP was developed as part of the Accelerating Computational Reproducibility in Economics (ACRE) project led by the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) in collaboration with the AEA Data Editor.
Who the SSRP is for:
SSRP is open to all social science researchers interested in advancing the reproducibility of research. It may be especially relevant for:
- Students and their instructors reproducing published research articles as part of class assignments (sometimes referred to as “replications”);
- Social science researchers interested in assessing and improving the computational reproducibility of their own or others’ research;
- Meta-researchers interested in analyzing the reproducibility of published work in the social sciences.
Guidance for Instructors
Instructors can use the SSRP in combination with the ACRe Guide to facilitate reproduction assignments in applied social science courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Students can use these materials with little to no supervision, covering learning activities such as:
- Assessing and improving the reproducibility of published work
- Applying good coding and data management practices
- Engaging in constructive exchanges with authors; and
- Developing a deep understanding of commonly used methods and computational techniques
Find more information about how to use the SSRP in the classroom here.
License
Except where otherwise noted, this work is copyrighted by the UC Regents and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
