Welcome!

Date: Monday-Thursday, June 11-14, 2018 10am-4pm & Conference Friday Location: Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building Auditorium, University of Utah Cost: FREE; CME available

This 5-day course provides an opportunity to explore issues of research reproducibility in-depth in a seminar-type setting, followed by hands-on sessions to learn actionable, practical solutions to make your own work more reproducible. You can choose to attend some or all of the sessions. The final day of the workshop is the conference Building Research Integrity through Reproducibility which requires a separate registration.

About the course

Various fields in the natural and social sciences face a ‘crisis of confidence’. Broadly, this crisis amounts to a pervasiveness of non-reproducible results in the published literature. For example, in the field of biomedicine, Amgen published findings that out of 53 landmark published results of pre-clinical studies, only 11% could be replicated successfully. This crisis is not confined to biomedicine. Areas that have recently received attention for non-reproducibility include biomedicine, economics, political science, psychology, as well as philosophy. Some scholars anticipate the expansion of this crisis to other disciplines.

This course explores the state of reproducibility. After giving a brief historical perspective, case studies from different disciplines (biomedicine, psychology, and philosophy) are examined to understand the issues concretely. Subsequently, problems that lead to non-reproducibility are discussed as well as possible solutions and paths forward.

Course Outline

Day Morning Sessions
10AM-Noon
Instructor: Hamid Seyedsayamdost		 Afternoon Sessions
1PM-4PM
Instructor: Vicky Steeves
June 11 Introduction: The Problem of Non-Reproducibility
Reproducibility: A Historical Perspective
State of Reproducibility: Bad Apples or Systemic Problems		 Git
GitLab/GitHub
June 12 Biomedicine
Psychology
Philosophy		 OpenRefine
R (including RStudio)
June 13 Statistical Methods
Fraud
Incentives, Transparency, and Accountability		 Jupyter Notebooks
ReproZip + VisTrails
June 14 Solutions Part I – Various Proposals
Solutions – Part II – Replications: Problems and Promise
Problems of Implementing Solutions		 OSF
June 15 Building Research Integrity through Reproducibility