An important step toward increasing replicability of findings is to increase the reproducibility of methods. Analysis methods can easily be made reproducible by publishing data analysis scripts. But what about data collection methods? 1/n
Collecting clean and valid data requires a lot of “secret sauce” in some research areas (e.g., EEG/ERP, fMRI, eye tracking, development). However, it’s not realistic to publish 20 pages of details about data collection methods in a conventional Method section. 2/n
But these details can matter. For example, we have shown that the temperature of the recording environment has a large impact on statistical power in ERP experiments. 3/n ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
To make data collection methods transparent and available, it is now possible to publish a detailed protocol, which can be cited in subsequent journal articles. We have now done this for our EEG recording methods. 4/n erpinfo.org/blog/2019/12/1…
We published our protocol using Nature’s Protocol Exchange web site. It’s free, appears to be robust, automatically generates a DOI, and is indexed by Google Scholar. 5/n
It does not involve peer review (because you are merely listing your procedures, not drawing any formal conclusions), but it does involve a quick administrative review (to make sure that inappropriate materials are not posted). 6/n
The protocol is published with a Creative Commons license, so Nature does not own it, and anyone can use it. Other sites may be even better, but Protocol Exchange fits our current needs reasonably well (although we would have liked more control over the formatting). 7/n
We will cite this protocol in future papers so that people can see all the details of how we record the EEG. And we encourage other researchers to either use and cite our protocol or create and cite their own protocols. 8/n
If you’ve published a protocol like this in your research area, please leave a comment! 9/n
