Self-Reporting the Potential Relevance and Feasibility of Redoing your Research

This self-reporting tool aims to help determine to what extent reproducibility or replication is relevant for your research and, if so, how feasible it would be to do.

Epistemic diversity

In recent years, there has been a growing focus on Open Science, including activities such as reproducibility or replication, with funders and publishers introducing policies to support or mandate such practices.
While reproducibility can be valuable, it is not always relevant or feasible for every type of research. Modes of knowledge production vary among and within fields, with differences in epistemic characteristics and practical conditions.
As a result, the relevance and feasibility of reproducibility in a given research context or for a particular study remains an open question or a matter of degree.
To support epistemic diversity, This short survey is designed to help us better understand your research and its specific characteristics. Your information will indicate whether reproducibility is relevant and feasible, ensuring that your study is assessed based on appropriate epistemic criteria and conditions rather than standards that may not be appropriate or applicable.

Redoing and enabling

Note there is no universal agreement on what reproducibility or replication means, either in general or concerning specific practices and their intended epistemic functions.
We do not use these terms. Instead, we distinguish between two basic categories of activities: redoing and enabling redoing or transparency or sharing.

Redoing refers to the process of redoing a study. More precisely, it involves specifying which aspects or parts of a study should be redone identically (or similarly) and which such vary.

Enabling is about providing sufficient transparency for others to critically engage with or redo parts of a study in the future. Enabling is about providing enough information, for instance, reporting, so that others can understand what was done and trace the processes of a study. Furthermore, enabling can involve aspects of sharing in the form of data, code, materials, skills, etc.

Epistemic functions

The functions of redoing and/or enabling are what makes them epistemically relevant because they aim to fulfill criteria that establish the quality and trustworthiness of the research practices in a study (e.g., validity, reliability, generalizability). Quality and trustworthiness of the research practices in turn establish the confidence that people can have in the claims that are made based on the research practices.

Importantly, reproducibility and replication are not singular practices serving a single function. Instead, they encompass numerous variations, each with different practices and purposes.
There is no universal agreement on what these terms mean to specific practices and their intended epistemic functions. Therefore, simply referring to reproducibility or replication does not provide sufficient information to assess their relevance and feasibility.
Often, a qualifier is attached to reproducibility or replication to indicate the intended function, but this approach is often too coarse.
To gain insight into the many dimensions of reproducibility in relation to epistemic functions, the following matrix may be useful. It outlines which parts of a study can be redone and what elements can be varied or kept constant.

To be able to aid you, we first ask questions about your understanding of reproducibility and replication. Based on this information, we first ask questions assessing relevance, and if relevant, then about the feasibility.