What Is Good Research?
Good research is research that others can assess, trust, and build upon. This guide introduces the ideas of replicability and reproducibility that underpin credible scientific work.
As researchers, we collect, analyze, and interpret data and communicate the results to others who can assess the quality of our work. We need to ensure that others can use our data through the complex journey of study design and data collection, analysis, and visualization. One way to achieve this is to describe our studies in enough detail so that others may assess and replicate them.
Replicability refers to a researcher's ability "to duplicate the results of a prior study if the same procedures are followed but new data are collected. That is, a failure to replicate a scientific finding is commonly thought to occur when one study documents relations between two or more variables and a subsequent attempt to implement the same operations fails to yield the same relations with the new data."
Reproducibility refers to a researcher's ability "to duplicate the results of a prior study using the same materials and procedures as were used by the original investigator. So, in an attempt to reproduce a published statistical analysis, a second researcher might use the same raw data to build the same analysis files and implement the same statistical analysis to determine whether they yield the same results."
(Bollen et al., 2015)