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Research transparency

From November 1, 2022, the World Trade Review (WTR) will implement the research transparency policy described below. Any authors submitting their paper from November 1, 2022 onwards agree to abiding by this policy should they be accepted for the journal. The policy aims to enhance access to data and to ensure reproducibility of research published in the journal.

Data Availability Statement and citation

All analyses reported in the WTR must be open and available to the scientific research community. Authors must make data, be it qualitative or quantitative, used in articles published by the WTR freely available. To this end, they must provide clear information on where their data and replication packages (for quantitative analysis) are hosted. We recommend authors upload their data to the WTR Dataverse, unless a particular third-party repository would be more appropriate for a specific dataset. Upon saving the data in Dataverse, a citation record is generated that includes a Digital Object Identifier (DOI - a permanent identifier).

At the end of the article the author should include a Data Availability Statement that describes where the data are located, using a DOI where possible. For example: 

"The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/ xxx"

In addition, the citation must be included in the article’s reference list or in a footnote (for papers using footnotes rather than a reference list). Citation example:

"Muster, Hans M. 2022, “Replication Data for: Title of the paper,” https://doi.org/ xxxxxx, Harvard Dataverse, V1"

(Where “xxx” is the article-specific DOI generated by Dataverse.)

Authors may post the data on their own websites as well, but the version cited in the article must be the Dataverse one. See here for more information about Data Availability Statements and further examples.

Exemptions to this data availability policy may be requested from the Editorial Board, but will only be granted if authors are unable to share data for legal or ethical reasons (for example if sharing data would compromise the privacy of human participants, or in cases of restricted-access source data). Authors must request an exemption to this policy at the time of submission, and clearly describe any restrictions that apply to their data in their Data Availability Statement.

Replication

At the time of final submission of accepted papers, authors of papers using quantitative data must provide the data set and accompanying command files to reproduce quantitative results (tables presented in the paper and any other specifications referenced in it, for example, results verbally described in the main text or in footnotes). They will be replicated by WTR Staff, and the paper will not begin the publication process until all results are confirmed. You do not need to send quantitative data until your article is accepted.

Unless the Editorial Board requests otherwise, authors of accepted articles using quantitative data are required to deposit (1) their data, (2) the codebook or any other relevant description of the data, which includes information about the source of the analysis data and instructions for extracting the analysis data from source data, (3) a file containing the exact and detailed commands used by author to reproduce all tables, figures, and exhibits (i.e., “do” or “run” files), and (4) a file containing the actual output from the statistical software used (i.e., “log” or “output” file). We strongly recommend using standard statistical software packages, whenever possible. Data and accompanying files should be uploaded to the WTR Dataverse in an entry that includes the article title and abstract as soon as possible after the acceptance of the manuscript.

Please review the data and replication packages of previously published papers on WTR Dataverse to gain a clear understanding of what is required for compliance. Complete instructions about Dataverse will be provided to the author with the conditional acceptance letter.  

Online appendix and supplementary material

Authors are encouraged to include additional information such as mentioning, listing, or describing any specialized software that competent scholars in the field might need to reproduce the results. Additional materials that are non-essential to the replication of the published results, but which could be of interest to readers, can be provided as supplementary material with the article. These materials will be posted on the Cambridge Core platform alongside the article.

Any questions about the replication policy may be directed to the WTR Editorial Staff at [email protected]