Improving Research Transparency in the Social Sciences

There is growing interest in enhancing research transparency and reproducibility in the social sciences. We discuss existing work on these topics, and discuss the evidence suggesting that publication bias and specification searching have been widespread across disciplines. We next discuss recent progress in this area, drawing on experiences in both economics and other social sciences. We focus on the trend toward preregistration of studies and pre-analysis plans, as well as multiple testing adjustments. We discuss areas where consensus is emerging on new practices, as well as approaches that remain controversial, and speculate about the most effective ways to make social science research more credible in the future.