Making Social Science More Reproducible (Starting with Data Curation and Code Review)

March 13, 2018, 1pm

GESIS, Cologne, Conference room East

Limor Peer

Abstract

To ensure that scientific data remain usable for the long term, data archives follow gold standard curation practices, such as enhancing documentation and creating metadata. Increasingly, data archives and repositories also accept code as a research object. Code is frequently involved in data transformation and is often required in order to reproduce findings in study reports and publications. In this talk, I will introduce CURE (CUrating for REproducibility), a consortium of academic institutions, of which Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) is a founding member, that support research data curation and code review for the purpose of facilitating the digital preservation of the evidence base necessary for future understanding, evaluation, and replication of scientific claims. I will focus on the origin and philosophy of the ISPS Data Archive, a repository for data and code underlying randomized controlled trials conducted by social scientists. I will explain our workflow and demonstrate our new home-grown curation software, which is powered by the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI).

About the speaker

Limor Peer is Associate Director for Research at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) at Yale University. She oversees research infrastructure and process at ISPS, including the Field Experiment Initiative, which encourages field experimentation and interdisciplinary collaboration in the social sciences at Yale and has led the creation of a specialized research data repository (the ISPS Data Archive). At Yale, she is currently involved in campus-wide efforts relating to research data sharing and preservation, serving as Research and Data Specialist at the Office of the Provost. Limor was trained as a social scientist, conducting research in political communication and journalism, and she’s held positions at Northwestern University prior to coming to Yale. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Communication Studies from Northwestern University and a B.A. (summa cum laude) in Political Science from Tel-Aviv University.