After the summer break, the tenth OSCR ReproducibiliTea journal club will take place on September 23th at 14:00. I will be the discussant, and we will talk about the following paper1:

Wicherts, J. M., Veldkamp, C. L. S., Augusteijn, H. E. M., Bakker, M., van Aert, R. C. M., & van Assen, M. A. L. M. (2016). Degrees of Freedom in Planning, Running, Analyzing, and Reporting Psychological Studies: A Checklist to Avoid p-Hacking. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1832. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01832

This paper presents a list of 34 degrees of freedom2 that researchers often encounter when planning, analyzing, and reporting the results of empirical studies. This list can be used not only to assess the transparency and trustworthiness of papers in the literature, but also to carefully evaluate one’s own biases and behaviors when conducting research. Last but not least, such a handy checklist can be proactively used as a blueprint when creating a comprehensive preregistration document as well as evaluating the quality of others’ preregistrations.

Although written with psychologists as the main target audience, this checklist can be applied in many other quantitative disciplines that analyze data within the null-hypothesis statistical framework (and mainly use p-values), and adapting it to fit other (statistical) methodologies is also possible. Attendees will be encouraged to examine the checklist and reflect on how it could help them in their own studies.

An invitation via Outlook calendar has been sent to researchers in the OSCR mailing list3. This email includes a link to join the meeting remotely using Zoom. Click on the link, insert the password provided in the invitation mail, and you will join the call.

During the Zoom meeting, please follow these guidelines:

  • wear headphones
  • mute your microphone
  • video is optional (in case of connection issues, you may be asked to turn it off)
  • pay attention to the moderator (which will be Antonio)
  • if you have questions
    • click on the Raise Hand button and the moderator will unmute you; or
    • write down your question in the chat and the moderator will read it
  • avoid talking over each other and make sure that everyone can have their opportunity to speak
  • arrive a few minutes before the beginning of the call, to familiarize with the online environment and solve possible technical issues

Please remember that attendees of every OSCR event (in-person or online) are required to follow our Code of Conduct.

Take care,

Antonio Schettino

  1. The slide deck will be available on our OSF repository.↩︎

  2. For an in-depth analysis of researchers’ degrees of freedom, read the paper by Simmons et al. discussed at our third ReproducibiliTea journal club.↩︎

  3. If you are not part of the OSCR mailing lists but would like to join, please contact Antonio.↩︎