Political science is a leader in scientific practices that ensure reproducible research (Moody, Keister, and Ramos Reference Moody, Keister and Ramos2022). Lupia and Elman (Reference Lupia and Elman2014, 23) note that “openness is an indispensable element of credible research and rigorous analysis, and hence essential to both making and demonstrating scientific progress.” Despite the broad movement toward reproducibility in political science since at least King’s (Reference King1995) transformative recommendations, many quantitative research articles do not share the underlying data and code. And despite the large literature reviewing our practices in political science (e.g., Key Reference Key2016; Stockemer, Koehler, and Lentz Reference Stockemer, Koehler and Lentz2018), we do not know how the availability of reproduction files has changed since 1995. In this project, we document the current practices and describe how practices have changed since 1995. How often do publications share their data and code today? And how has this changed over the last three decades?
A growing body of literature in the social sciences emphasizes the importance of replication and reproducibility to scientific credibility (e.g., Grossman and Pedahzur Reference Grossman and Pedahzur2021). In the last two decades, scholars have developed a huge body of work that discusses the replicability and reproducibility of research (for a thorough review, see National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2019). This effort is gaining momentum across the social and medical sciences, and political scientists are leaders in this effort (Moody, Keister, and Ramos Reference Moody, Keister and Ramos2022; see also the symposium on “Openness in Political Science” in the January 2014 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics and the colloquium in the March 13, 2018, issue of PNAS).
Unfortunately, this literature has sometimes offered different and even contradictory definitions of “replication” and “reproducibility.” However, an emerging consensus is that “replication” refers to researchers obtaining substantively similar results across multiple studies (i.e., using different data). Reproducibility, on the other hand, refers narrowly to computational reproducibility—that other researchers can use the same data (and perhaps even the same code) to obtain the same results. In this project, we focus narrowly on the availability of the data and code that support the quantitative analysis.Footnote 1 The availability of the data and code, in turn, facilitate computational reproducibility. In political science, for example, some journals require authors to share their data and computer code prior to publication.Footnote 2 At some journals, an editorial assistant reruns the analysis and confirms that the results match those reported in the article (Brodeur et al. Reference Brodeur, Esterling, Ankel-Peters, Bueno, Desposato, Dreber and Genovese2024). For these journals that require sharing data and code, a large percentage of articles have accompanying data and code (Key Reference Key2016). However, not all journals require sharing data and code publicly. Although this policy is common for the most visible journals in political science, like the American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, and International Organization, the policies are not widespread. In this article, we document how often publications include their data and code across a wide range of political science journals from 1995 to 2022.
The Importance of Computational Reproducibility
Social science is an increasingly computational science. We have seen tremendous growth in the availability and use of quantitative data (for a review, see Brady Reference Brady2019). Furthermore, the availability of fast, powerful computers has led to the broad adoption of complex computational methods. For projects using large, quantitative data sets or complex computational tools, it is usually difficult (or impossible) to supply readers with the full details of the method. For these complex projects, the researchers must supply data and code to make the methods transparent. More importantly, by sharing the data and code, researchers allow others to reproduce the results, confirm the correctness of the computation, understand undocumented decisions, and build on the research (Barnes Reference Barnes2010). Buckheit and Donoho (Reference Buckheit, Donoho and Antoniadis1995, 5) make the point starkly: “An article about computational science in a scientific publication is not the scholarship itself, it is merely advertising of the scholarship. The actual scholarship is the complete software development environment and the complete set of instructions that generated the figures” (italics ours).
More importantly, by sharing the data and code, researchers allow others to reproduce the results, confirm the correctness of the computation, understand undocumented decisions, and build on the research.
But regardless of whether the article is “merely advertising,” researchers widely share a value that researchers ought to allow others to verify their computations. Peng (Reference Peng2011, 1226) writes, “[t]he standard of reproducibility calls for the data and the computer code used to analyze the data be made available to others… . [U]nder this standard, limited exploration of the data and the analysis code is possible and may be sufficient to verify the quality of the scientific claims.”
Critically, neither the availability of a reproduction archive nor the successful reproduction of the results guarantees the correctness of the results. Instead, the availability of a reproduction archive makes results verifiable by documenting precisely how the results were created. Donoho (Reference Donoho2010, 358) argues that “computation-based science publication is currently a doubtful enterprise because there is not enough support for identifying and rooting out sources of error in computational work.” Sharing data and code allows authors to demonstrate the correctness of the results (and introduces a powerful incentive for correctness) and allows others to verify their claims.
Existing Efforts to Assess Availability
There are two main existing efforts to assess availability of reproduction archives in political science. Key (Reference Key2016) examines the availability of reproduction archives for articles published in 2013 and 2014 in American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, International Organization, Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis. She thoroughly searched for publicly posted material but did not email the authors to request the reproduction archive. Across these top journals in 2013 and 2014, she finds that about 66% of articles publicly share the underlying data and code. However, she finds considerable heterogeneity across journals. Among the journals that required sharing a reproduction archive, 93% of articles supply the underlying data and code. But among journals that did not require sharing, the number drops to about 43%. However, Key (Reference Key2016) focuses on six of the most visible journals in political science, and some of these have among the most aggressive policies requiring public reproduction archives. Gherghina and Katsanidou (Reference Gherghina and Katsanidou2013) looked at the policies employed by a large collection of 120 political science journals beyond the highly visible journals in Key’s (Reference Key2016) study. Of these 120 journals, only 18 had data availability policies posted on their website.
Stockemer, Koehler, and Lentz (Reference Stockemer, Koehler and Lentz2018) take a different approach. They identify all articles published in three political behavior subfield journals: Electoral Studies, Party Politics, and Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties. None of these journals required sharing data and code at the time of their study. For each article, they carefully searched for replication data, and if their search was unsuccessful, they contacted the authors (up to four times) to request the data. Despite a laborious search, Stockemer, Koehler, and Lentz were able to obtain the data and code for only about 57% of the articles in their study. The authors identified 145 articles and found posted reproduction archives for 13 (9%) and obtained archives via email for 69 (48%). Despite their thoroughness, these authors are unable to obtain reproduction archives for 43% of the articles published in these reputable journals.
This existing work leaves an important question remaining. Key (Reference Key2016) finds that sharing is common for articles in the top journals, but only when those journals require sharing. For a set of subfield journals focusing on political behavior (that do not require sharing), Stockemer, Koehler, and Lentz (Reference Stockemer, Koehler and Lentz2018) find that only about 9% of articles publicly share their data and code. This raises an important question: For a broad collection of political science journals, how common is publicly sharing the data and code that supports an article? And how has that changed over time?
To address these questions, we explore the availability of reproduction archives across a much wider time frame (1995 to 2022) and a much wider set of journals (all English-language journals in the Social Science Citation Index’s “Political Science” and “International Relations” categories). Our findings are much less optimistic than Key’s (Reference Key2016) results but perhaps more optimistic than those of Stockemer, Koehler, and Lentz’s (Reference Stockemer, Koehler and Lentz2018). To preview, we find that only about 31% of articles published in 2022 point readers to reproduction archives. That rate is steadily shrinking, but incrementally.
Data
To explore the availability of reproduction archives across a wider time frame and set of journals, we take a random sample of quantitative research articles published in political science journals from 1995 to 2022 and code whether the publication points readers to publicly available data and code. We discuss the details of this procedure below.
To obtain the sample of quantitative research articles, we proceed in three steps:
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1. First, we generate a list of political science journals—a surprisingly challenging step. We rely on the Social Science Citation Index, using their “Political Science” and “International Relations” categories. As a practical matter, we remove all 18 journals in languages other than English, leaving 224 journals. We use Crossref’s API to collect all 560,514 digital object identifiers (DOIs) from these 224 journals from 1995 to 2022. From this list, we take a simple random sample of 5,000 DOIs and an additional over-sample of 1,000 DOIs from 2022.
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2. A team of four coders assess each of the 6,000 DOIs. We code whether the DOI belongs to a research article with underlying quantitative data and computer code that the authors could potentially share—what we call a “quantitative research article.” Many DOIs do not meet this criterion; we discard those. We are left with a random sample of 1,413 quantitative research articles.
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3. We evaluate whether each of the 1,413 quantitative research articles points readers to the underlying data and code. We classified the articles into the following categories based on whether and how they shared their underlying data and code: not mentioned, available upon request, description of where to find (but hard to find), description of where to find (and easy to find), linked (but no longer available), or linked (and still available).Footnote 3 Two caveats are important. First, if the article does not point the reader to the data and code, we code that article as “not mentioned.”Footnote 4 This standard aligns with discipline norms and King’s (Reference King1995, 446) standard that researchers should share data and code with a professional archive (e.g., ICPSR at the time) and that “it should be made publicly available and reference to it made in the original publication (usually in the first footnote).” Second, we did not evaluate the quality of the files; we only evaluated whether the publication points to the data and/or code. If the publication points to the data and code, we consider the archive “available” regardless of whether the data and code are working or complete.
Results
To show how practices are changing over time, we start by collapsing the cases into two categories: shared or not. If the publication (a) provides a working link to the reproduction archive or (b) describes where to find the reproduction archive and it was easy to find, then we consider that data and code “available.” Otherwise, we consider it “unavailable.” To increase the precision of the estimates, we fit a regression model that estimates a monotonic increase each year in the rate of availability.Footnote 5
Figure 1 shows the percentage of articles that share data and code over time. Starting with the publication of King’s (Reference King1995) “Replication, Replication,” almost no articles shared their data and code. We code 122 articles from 1995 to 2002, and none contained working links to data and code or described how to find it—the first article in our sample to share data and code occurred in 2003. Figure 1 shows that sharing remains relatively rare (less than about 5%) until about 2008, when availability starts to become more common. For context, International Studies Perspectives published a symposium in 2003 in which the editors of four prominent international relations journals (Journal of Peace Research, International Studies Quarterly, International Interactions, and Journal of Conflict Resolution) urge other editors to join them in requiring that that authors “must make their data available” (Bueno de Mesquita et al. Reference de Mesquita, Bruce, James, King, Metelits, Ray, Russett, Strand and Valeriano2003). The Dataverse Project began three years later in 2006 (King Reference King2007). From about 2008 to the present, sharing has become more common, although perhaps not as rapidly as one might think. When APSA released its professional ethics standard in 2012 (APSA 2012), about 8% of articles shared their data and code. That number was about 12% in 2014 when Lupia and Alter (Reference Lupia and Alter2014, 57) wrote, “[t]oday, information on the data production and analytic decisions that underlie many published works in political science is unavailable.” A decade later, that number has almost tripled to 31%. Still, 69% of articles do not share their data and code, but we have made incremental progress. The changes shown in Figure 1 represent a massive shift in norms, requirements, and infrastructure. And the improvement is not accidental but due to a decades-long, deliberate effort by leaders in the field (e.g., King Reference King1995; Bueno de Mesquita et al. Reference de Mesquita, Bruce, James, King, Metelits, Ray, Russett, Strand and Valeriano2003; King Reference King2007; Lupia and Alter Reference Lupia and Alter2014).
The changes shown in Figure 1 represent a massive shift in norms, requirements, and infrastructure. And the improvement is not accidental but due to a decades-long, deliberate effort by leaders in the field.
Figure 1 Percentage of Quantitative Articles with Reproduction Archives, 1995–2022
This figure shows the estimated percentage of quantitative research articles published in political science journals from 1995 to 2022 that supply reproduction archives.
Next, we break the articles into categories to look for heterogeneity in practices. First, we look at APSA journals. These journals include the organization’s journals (American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics) and the section journals (e.g., Political Behavior, State Politics and Policy Quarterly). We might expect large differences between the APSA and non-APSA journals. After all, APSA journals are among the most visible journals in the discipline, and the APSA has a formal code of ethics that requires sharing data and/or code to reproduce the results (absent special circumstances).
As one might expect, Figure 2 shows that the percentage of articles published in 2022 with reproduction archives available is much higher for APSA journals (57%) than for non-APSA journals (27%). However, barely a majority (57%) of articles published in our discipline’s core journals share their data and code with the community; 43% do not. This underscores our point that improvement in sharing practice has been incremental and that more work remains to be done, even in the journals at the center of our discipline.
Figure 2 Results for APSA and non-APSA Journals
This figure shows the estimated percentage of quantitative research articles published in APSA journals and non-APSA political science journals from 1995 to 2022 that supply reproduction archives.
Next, we break the articles into four categories based on journal rankings. We use the SCImago Journal Rank score from 2022 to give each journal a rating. Then we place the 1,413 articles into one of four equally sized bins based on the SCImago Journal Rank score of the journal they were published in. As examples, articles published in American Political Science Review, International Organization, or Political Science Research and Methods are placed in the top quartile, those in Journal of Peace Research or Electoral Studies in the second, those in Conflict Management and Peace Science or Legislative Studies Quarterly in the third, and those in International Interactions or State Politics and Policy Quarterly in the bottom category. One might expect that articles published in the highest ranked journals to have higher rates of sharing. Indeed, that is what we find.
Figure 3 shows that about 74% of articles published in 2022 in journals ranked in the top quartile supply a reproduction archive. However, sharing rates drop dramatically outside the top quartile—which includes many high-profile journals (10 of the 14 APSA journals in our data fall outside the top quartile). About 38% of articles in the second quartile supply reproduction archives. The percentage in the third and bottom quartiles drops to 13% each.Footnote 6
Figure 3 Results by Journal Ranking Quartile
This figure shows the estimated percentage of quantitative research articles published in variously ranked political science journals from 1995 to 2022 that supply reproduction archives.
Last, Figure 4 shows the results for the broad range of categories that we coded. Most of the movement happens between the two important categories of “not mentioned” and “linked, still available.” The number of articles that do not mention the data and code shrinks from about 97% in 1995 to 57% in 2022. We have seen progress (but incremental). The number of articles with working links to their reproduction archives has grown from 0% in 1995 and 4% in 2014 to 21% in 2022. About 11% of articles published in 2022 offer a description of where to find the archive, and we were able to easily locate it. This number continues to grow; we encourage authors to instead use a permanent archive (e.g., OSF or Dataverse) and supply a persistent DOI for the archive with their published article. The number of articles that have data “available upon request” is growing but low—about 4% in 2022. The percentage with a link that no longer works is surprisingly low, about 2% for articles published around 2010, which suggests that professional archives like Dataverse have been remarkably successful. About 5% of recent articles offer a description of where to find the reproduction archive (e.g., “available on the author’s website”), but we were not able to easily locate the archive (e.g., the author updated their website URL). The number of authors that opt out of sharing data and/or code for explicitly stated legal or ethical concerns remains negligible—less than about 1%—throughout the period.
Figure 4 Results for Disaggregated Categories
This figure shows the estimated percentage of quantitative articles published in political science journals from 1995 to 2022 that falls into our seven categories.
Conclusion
King (Reference King1995) implores political scientists to share their data and code so that others can verify and build on their results. The 2012 revisions to APSA ethics (discussed in the 2014 symposium in PS) formally affirm this value. But the question remains: How are we doing? Do researchers consistently share their data and code? Is sharing increasing?
To address these questions, we take a random sample of 6,000 articles published in political science journals, identify 1,413 for which sharing data and code is appropriate, and code whether the published article points to a publicly available reproduction archive. Unfortunately, we find that—even in 2022—the answer is “usually not.” However, practices are incrementally improving. In 2014, when the DA-RT symposium was published, about 12% of quantitative research articles point to the data and code. Eight years later, in 2022, that has increased to 31%, underscoring a massive shift in norms, requirements, and infrastructure. Still, only a minority of articles share the supporting data and code. And the results seem robust. Since we completed our data collection, Scoggins and Robertson (Reference Scoggins and Robertson2024) published similar data using an alternative approach and obtain largely similar results.
In 2014, when the DA-RT symposium was published, about 12% of quantitative research articles point to the data and code. Eight years later, in 2022, that has increased to 31%, underscoring a massive shift in norms, requirements, and infrastructure.
We suspect that these changing practices are driven by changing journal requirements. Key (Reference Key2016) shows that journal requirements are a primary driver in sharing rates. Although verifying the replication code can be costly and require additional organization, Key (Reference Key2016) notes that editors can easily require authors to include a persistent link to the reproduction archive in the final manuscript—this is the core policy recommended in the International Studies Perspectives symposium more than two decades ago (Bueno de Mesquita et al. Reference de Mesquita, Bruce, James, King, Metelits, Ray, Russett, Strand and Valeriano2003). Although this minimal policy does not guarantee that the results are reproducible, it “allows other interested scholars to verify and use the data and code and provides an opportunity for students to learn through replication” (Key Reference Key2016, 271). In this article, we show that for too many articles published today, others cannot verify the results and students cannot use the data and code to learn through replication. We encourage editors to (continue to) insist on it.
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
The editors have granted an exception to the data policy for this manuscript. In this case, replication code and data are available to reproduce its figures and tables, but there are substantively small differences between the replication and the printed results. This exception was granted because the authors affirmed that these differences are attributable to randomness in the sampling procedure that generates draws from Bayesian posterior distributions that do not change the conclusions of the manuscript.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
The authors declare no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research.
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