[From the article “Push button replication: Is impact evaluation evidence for international development verifiable?” by Benjamin Wood, Rui Müller, and Annette Brown, published in PLoS ONE]

“…We drew a sample of articles from the ten journals that published the most impact evaluations from low- and middle-income countries from 2010 through 2012. This set includes health, economics, and development journals.” 

“…Of the 109 articles in our sample, only 27 are push button replicable, meaning the provided code run on the provided dataset produces comparable findings for the key results in the published article. The authors of 59 of the articles refused to provide replication files. Thirty of these 59 articles were published in journals that had replication file requirements in 2014, meaning these articles are non-compliant with their journal requirements.”

“…The findings presented here reveal that many economics, development, and public health researchers are a long way from adopting the norm of open research. Journals do not appear to be playing a strong role in ensuring the availability of replication files.”

To read the article, click here.