Scientific Publishing

Poor statistical reporting, inadequate data presentation and spin persist despite editorial advice

The Journal of Physiology and British Journal of Pharmacology jointly published an editorial series in 2011 to improve standards in statistical reporting and data analysis. It is not known whether reporting practices changed in response to the …

Public Availability of Published Research Data in High-Impact Journals

Background There is increasing interest to make primary data from published research publicly available. We aimed to assess the current status of making research data available in highly-cited journals across the scientific literature. Methods and …

Public Data Archiving in Ecology and Evolution: How Well Are We Doing?

Policies that mandate public data archiving (PDA) successfully increase accessibility to data underlying scientific publications. However, is the data quality sufficient to allow reuse and reanalysis? We surveyed 100 datasets associated with …

Reproducible research practices, transparency, and open access data in the biomedical literature, 2015–2017

Currently, there is a growing interest in ensuring the transparency and reproducibility of the published scientific literature. According to a previous evaluation of 441 biomedical journals articles published in 2000–2014, the biomedical literature …

Risk of Bias in Reports of In Vivo Research: A Focus for Improvement

The reliability of experimental findings depends on the rigour of experimental design. Here we show limited reporting of measures to reduce the risk of bias in a random sample of life sciences publications, significantly lower reporting of …

Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate

Background Sharing research data provides benefit to the general scientific community, but the benefit is less obvious for the investigator who makes his or her data available. Principal Findings We examined the citation history of 85 cancer …

Systematic Review of the Empirical Evidence of Study Publication Bias and Outcome Reporting Bias — An Updated Review

Background The increased use of meta-analysis in systematic reviews of healthcare interventions has highlighted several types of bias that can arise during the completion of a randomised controlled trial. Study publication bias and outcome reporting …

The influence of journal submission guidelines on authors' reporting of statistics and use of open research practices

From January 2014, Psychological Science introduced new submission guidelines that encouraged the use of effect sizes, estimation, and meta-analysis (the “new statistics”), required extra detail of methods, and offered badges for use of open science …

The Post-Embargo Open Access Citation Advantage: It Exists (Probably), It’s Modest (Usually), and the Rich Get Richer (of Course)

Many studies show that open access (OA) articles—articles from scholarly journals made freely available to readers without requiring subscription fees—are downloaded, and presumably read, more often than closed access/subscription-only articles. …

Toward Reproducible Computational Research: An Empirical Analysis of Data and Code Policy Adoption by Journals

Journal policy on research data and code availability is an important part of the ongoing shift toward publishing reproducible computational science. This article extends the literature by studying journal data sharing policies by year (for both 2011 …