theory (hallmarks of quantitative and formal analysis). In Tolstoy’s famous metaphor, “foxes” consistently outperform “hedgehogs.” See Tetlock (2017). 180 Andrew Moravcsik https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108688253.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press they are. In recent years, qualitative social scientists have moved to establish stronger norms of transparency. Building on the American Political Science Association’s initiative on Data Access and Research Transparency (APSA/ DA-RT) in the US field of political science, a team of scholars has developed specific applied transparency guidelines for qualitative research. A series of conferences, workshops, journal articles, and foundation projects are further elaborating how best to implement qualitative transparency in practice. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded a Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) based at Syracuse University, as well as various projects demonstrating new transparency standards and instruments that use new software and internet technologies. Scholars have thereby generated shared knowledge and experience about this issue. They have learned that qualitative research poses distinctive practical problems due to factors such as human subject protection, intellectual property law, and logistical complexity, and distinctive epistemological problems, which arise from its unique narrative form. These must be kept in mind when assessing alternative proposals to enhance transparency. Four major options exist: conventional footnotes, hyperlinks to online sources, archiving textual data, and digitally enabled discursive notes. A close examination of these options reveals, first, that the practical and epistemological distinctiveness of qualitative research implies a different strategy than is employed in quantitative research, and, second, that the optimal strategy is that of creating digital entries containing annotated source material, often called Active Citation or the Annotation for Transparency Initiative. We consider each of these four options in turn. 8.3.1 Conventional Footnotes The simplest and most widespread instruments of transparency used today in social science are citations found in footnotes, endnotes, and the text itself. Yet the current state of citation practice demonstrates the flaws in this approach. Basic citations in published work are often incomplete or incorrect, particularly if they appear as brief in-text “scientific citations” designed for a world in which most (quantitative) analysts use footnotes to acknowledge other researchers rather than cite evidence. Such citations do not provide 12 American Political Science Association (2013). 13 American Political Science Association (2013), for guidance on qualitative methods. 14 Qualitative Data Repository (QDR), Center for Qualitative and Multi-Method Inquiry, Syracuse University: www.qdr.org. 181 The Transparency Revolution https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108688253.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press either data access or analytic transparency. Scientific citations are often incomplete, leaving out page numbers and failing to specify the concrete textual reference within an article or on a page that the author considers decisive. Even if a citation is precise, most readers will be deterred by the need to locate each source at some third location, perhaps a library or an archive – and, in many cases, as with interviews and records of focus groups, the source material may not be available at all. Even more troubling, conventional citations offer no analytical transparency whatsoever: the reader knows what is cited, but generally much less about why. In theory, an attractive solution would be to return to the traditional method of linking evidence and explanation in most scholarly fields: long discursive footnotes containing extended quotations with interpretive annotations. Discursive footnotes of this kind remain widespread in legal academia, history, some humanities, and a few other academic disciplines that still prize qualitative transparency. In legal academia, for example, where fidelity to the precise text and rigorous interpretation are of great academic and practical value, articles may have dozens, even hundreds, of such discursive footnotes – a body of supplementary material many times longer than the article itself. The format evolved because it can enhance all three dimensions of transparency. The researcher is often obliged to insert extensive quotations from sources (data access); annotate those quotations with extensive interpretation of how, why, and to what extent they support a claim made in the text and how they fit into the broader context (analytic transparency); and discuss issues of data selection and opposing evidence (production transparency). At a glance, readers can scan everything: the main argument, the citation, the source material, the author’s interpretation, and information about how representative the source is. In many ways, discursive footnotes remain the “best practice” instruments for providing efficient qualitative transparency. Yet recent trends in formatting social science journals – in particular, the advent of so-called scientific citations and ever-tighter word limits – have all but banished discursive footnotes. This trend is not methodologically neutral: it privileges quantitative research that employs external datasets and cites secondary journals rather than data, while blocking qualitative research from citing and interpreting texts in detail. As a result, in many social sciences, we see relatively little serious debate about the empirics of 15 Systematic replication results from highly regarded political science research suggest that levels of error and omission total 20–30 percent of citations. 182 Andrew Moravcsik https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108688253.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press qualitative research. Replication or reanalysis is extremely difficult, and extension or secondary analysis almost impossible. Given the economics of social science journals, this trend is unlikely to reverse. Practitioners and policy analysts face similar constraints, because they often aim their publications, at least in part, at nonexperts. Memos and reports have been growing shorter. Long discursive footnotes pose a visual barrier, both expanding the size of a text, and rendering it less readable and accessible. In sum, conventional footnotes and word limits are part of the problem, not the solution. 8.3.2 Hyperlinks to Online Sources Some suggest that a simple digital solution would be to link articles and reports to source documents already posted online. Many government reports, journalistic articles, contemporary scholarship, and blogs often do just this. Yet this offers an inadequate level of research transparency, for three basic reasons. First, much material simply cannot be found online: Most primary field research evidence (e.g., interviews) is not there, and despite the efforts of archives to digitalize, we are far from having all documents online even in the most advanced industrial democracies, let alone elsewhere. Even journalistic articles and secondary scholarly works are unevenly available, with much inaccessible online (or hidden behind paywalls), in foreign languages, or buried within longer documents. Second, links to outside sources are notoriously unstable, and subject to “link rot” or removal. Attempts to stabilize links to permit cross-citation have proven extremely challenging even when they focus on a very narrow range of documents (e.g., academic medical journals), and it is nearly impossible to do so if one is dealing, as policy analysts do, with an essentially unlimited range of contemporary material of many types and in many languages. Third, even when sources are available online – or whenwe place them online for this purpose – hyperlinks provide only data transparency, not analytical and process transparency. We learn what source a scholar cited but not why, let alone how he or she interpreted, contextualized, and weighed the evidence. This 16 Even quantitative social and natural scientists now employ online appendices, sometimes many times longer than the articles, to convey such background information. 17 Web pages migrate or disappear surprisingly often when periodicals and book series switch owners, formats, or archiving systems or when government agencies, private firms, or civil society groups reorganize. For example, this occurred in 2009 to the entire flagship series of US government documents on foreign policy (US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States). 183 The Transparency Revolution https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108688253.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press undermines one of the distinctive epistemological advantages of qualitative research. 8.3.3 Archiving Evidence in a Centralized Database For many from other research traditions, data archiving may seem at first glance the most natural way to enhance transparency. It is, after all, the conventional solution employed by statistical researchers, who create centralized, homogeneous “datasets” where all evidence is stored, connected to a single set of algorithms used to analyze it. Moreover, data repositories do already exist for textual material, notably the Qualitative Data Repository for social science materials recently established with NSF funding at Syracuse University. Data archiving is admittedly essential, especially for the purpose of preserving complete collections of new field data drawn from interviews, ethnographic notes, primary document collections, and web-searches of manageable size that are unencumbered by human subject or copyright restrictions. Archiving full datasets can also help create a stronger bulwark against selection bias (“cherry-picking” or constructing biased case studies by selecting only confirming evidence) by obliging qualitative schol