Science

Robust, reproducible and transparent research

At our working group, we make our own research ‘open’ and transparent, unless there are good reasons not to do so (in which case we also state these reasons in the publication). We are convinced that open science practices improve the content of our research and contribute to expanding the robust body of knowledge in psychology. To this end we accept the additional work involved.

This includes various practices such as pre-registration, open scripts, open data, accessible project documentation (e.g. on the OSF website, https://osf.io/) and much more. Wherever possible, we use non-proprietary software to ensure the reproducibility of our research results by the wider community. Where possible, we use licence-free measuring instruments.

For every publication for which we are the first author, we generally carry out an independent technical reproducibility check. If extremely complex calculations are necessary (e.g. several weeks on a cluster), then we check with a reduced number of runs that the script at least runs without errors. A colleague checks whether everything is running, is well documented and whether it is clear which steps are necessary for this.

Conducting research with high standards of reproducibility and strong evidence is time-consuming. Documenting and publishing data takes time. We see a certain trade-off between quantity and quality and are clearly focussing on the latter. This has an impact on the supervision and assessment of dissertations and theses.

As reviewers, editors and committee members, we follow the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA): ‘If you are on committees that decide on funding, hiring, tenure or promotion, you should base your judgement on scientific content, not publication numbers’.

We try to record procedural steps (e.g. in study organisation or data analysis) that are repetitive or similar across several projects in writing in order to create versions of ‘standard lab practices’. This serves the purpose of comparability and the transfer of established knowledge within the working groups.

Of course we are aware that not every single one of our papers can fulfil all these objectives to the maximum. But this is the objective. And this is what we strive for.

At LMU, there is the interdisciplinary ‘LMU Open Science Centre’ (LMU OSC) and the Open Science Initiative in Psychology at the Department of Psychology (OSIP). Both websites offer many tips and tools on the topic of Open Science.

Authorship

We document the author roles in each publication using the CREdiT taxonomy to make the respective contributions visible.

If a scientific publication based on a study is intended (which is often not the case with theses, for example), the topic of authorship should be discussed with all persons involved, ideally before the study begins, and at the latest before the paper is written. The DGPs has formulated the following professional ethical guidelines on the topic of authorship (https://www.dgps.de/index.php?id=85), which we follow unless other agreements have been made between the persons involved in a study:

Some excerpt from the guidelines (translated from the German original):

  1. Labelling the contribution to a research paper in publications:
  1. Psychologists only claim responsibility for a research paper, including authorship, if they carried out the work themselves or were significantly involved in it.
  2. First authorship or co-authorship correctly reflect the contribution that an author has made to the research work; they are not influenced by the professional or scientific status of the persons involved. The mere professional position, such as that of a chair holder or the head of a research institution, does not justify any entitlement to authorship. Minor contributions to a research paper or to the preparation of the publication are appropriately labelled, e.g. in footnotes or in the foreword.
  3. As a rule, a doctoral candidate is the first author of an article written by several authors if the article is mainly based on his/her doctoral thesis. The supervisors discuss the authorship of possible publications with their doctoral candidates as early as possible and in an appropriate form during the course of the research and publication. The same applies to other qualifications obtained under supervision in education, training and further education.

This means that all authors of a paper at our department are expected to make a significant contribution. Doctoral supervisors are usually significantly involved in the studies of their doctoral students. Co-authors also assume responsibility for the content of a paper. We do not follow the common practice of automatically including the chair holder on the paper.

First authors are usually those who have written the majority of the first formulated draft of a paper. This also applies when students publish their theses and turn their submitted work into a draft paper. In psychology, last authors are often perceived as the supervisors of the project, so it is common, for example, to list the doctoral supervisor as the last author.

Conferences

Some of us frequently go to the following conferences:

  • Konferenz der DGPs (usually we all go there)
  • Konferenz der Fachgruppe DPPD
  • European Conference of Personality (ECP)
  • Conference of the Society for Ambulatory Assessment (SAA)
  • Motivationspsychologisches Kolloquium (MPK)

Science Communication

We have created our own document on the subject of ‘science communication’, which is intended to inspire and encourage people to publicise their own research results. True to the motto: Do good and talk about it :)

For lab members the document can be found here: Confluence - Wissenschaftskommunikation

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