Replicate My Work!

Scientific work requires transparency. There is no mad genius in his/her lonely tower working for years on end on some great invention. While it may be true that professors have little time for anything but their research, they communicate their findings (along with their methods). Science is a social enterprise. Primed by Gary King‘s essay “Replication, Replication” (1995) and lectures by Rainer Schnell, I arrived at the conclusion that a scientific workflow must be a reproducible workflow. I do think that making replication material broadly available is a good thing for everyone involved.

Replication materials for my recent publications can now be found online. Maintaining a reproducible workflow is hard work but rewarding. Looking back, I could have improved a lot of things (without changing the results, mind you). It felt a bit awkward at first. Soon enough it felt even more awkward to have waited so long to put up the material. I wish I could share more of my older publications (and also raw data) but privacy laws, work contracts, and fellow psychologists who are highly skeptical of these ideas keep me from doing so.

Hopefully, the present material is just the beginning. Sadly, most psychologists do not share their materials publicly so I had to figure out most stuff on my own. I decided against third-party repositories because some focus solely on data sets whereas others are somewhat difficult to handle. So I wrote the HTML by hand hoping that a plain format allows for longevity. Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements.