Submissions

Note

>> The submission portal will be made available in fall 2025

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission’s compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

• Pre-print uploaded to repository and assigned a DOI

• Preregistration link accessible and included in manuscript

• Preregistration deviations disclosed and discussed

• Open Data, Materials, and Code accessible and linked in the manuscript; reasons for withheld data must be stated (e.g., ethical reasons such as privacy)

• Instructions for reproducibility checks provided and linked in the manuscript

Author Guidelines

Replication Research is a publication platform for replications and reproductions from various disciplines. Articles need to disclose what original study and hypothesis/claim they replicated or reproduced. For an up-to-date overview of the disciplines from which we accept submissions, please see the editorial board. Generally, we can provide adequate quality assurance and peer-review for cognitive, behavioral, and social science studies (psychology, economics, sociology, education sciences, political sciences, management, medicine, life sciences).

Please note that the entire review process is open and reviews will be permanently linked with submitted manuscripts via their DOIs and Pubpeer.com regardless whether the article is accepted or rejected. This is so that quality assurance is transparent, and so that work provided by reviewers for Replication Research is credited and not discarded.

• Pre-Submission checks
  Authors need to conduct automatized checks before submission. These include checks of reported test statistics and p-values via statcheck.io, checks for non-cited replication studies via FReD Annotator, and checks for cited retracted articles via Papercheck (Scienceverse).

• Pre-Prints
  Before submission, articles must be posted to a pre-print server that assigns the article a DOI (e.g., arXiv, OSF preprints, Zenodo).

• Author Contributions
  Author contributions must be reported using the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT).

• Preregistration
  Studies must be preregistered. Exceptions need to be justified and clearly communicated as exploratory studies. The link to the preregistration must be included in the manuscript and accessible during peer review. Note that secondary data analyses can be preregistered, too. The authors must disclose whether the analysis plan was included in the preregistration and whether the analysis script was preregistered. All deviations from the preregistration must be discussed openly with respect to (1) a description of the deviation, (2) a justification for it, and (3) a note on how the deviation does or might affect the results.

• Open Data, Materials, and Code
  Data, materials, and code must be posted to a trusted repository (e.g., osf.io, researchbox.org, zenodo.org). Links to the repository must be included in the manuscript. Upon acceptance, the authors must create a frozen version of the repository and update all links (e.g., via OSF Registrations). Exceptions to this rule must be identified and justified at article submission (e.g., data privacy, ethical reasons). In these cases, authors must add a justification in their report (Closed Data Statement).

• Transparency Statement
  Authors must declare all potential conflicts of interest, include the 21 word solution or a derivative thereof, and explain if and how they are connected to the authors of the original work. Authors must declare use of AI (e.g., “The introduction has been written by ChatGTP 4.0”). Finally, for empirical submissions, authors must include a file-drawer statement in which they declare that they have reported all studies that they carried out on this topic.

• Reproducibility
  Results need to be push-button-replicable. That means, the authors need to provide simple instructions on how to reproduce all results reported in the manuscript. To facilitate reproducibility checks, we encourage authors to use free open source software. A link to the instructions needs to be included in the manuscript.

• PubPeer commenting
  Regardless of the decision (accept, revise, reject), reviews and responses will be posted to PubPeer (pubpeer.com) after each review stage. They will be prominently labelled as Peer-Review Reports to avoid overloading institutional review boards.

• Collaborative Copy-Editing
  Replication Research has no author processing charges. To be able to maintain the journal, authors are expected to engage in copy-editing. Consequently, this phase will take as long as a peer-review round.

Article Types

Articles submitted to Replication Research need to investigate a research question that has been previously investigated in a published study or discuss replication methods that are relevant for at least two different research areas. Empirical reports can be computational reproductions using the same data and code, robustness checks using the same data but different procedures, close replications using new data and the same method, or conceptual replications using new data and a different method. Replication closeness needs to be described in detail.

Replications (different data)

Replication studies test a previously published claim or hypothesis using different data than the original study. They can be internal (i.e., by the same group of researchers), close, or conceptual (for a typology see Hüffmeier et al., 2016). Authors can use their own format or a standardized template provided by Replication Research. This Standardized Replication Template (StaRT) is available online at https://osf.io/3jgxd.

Upon acceptance, we expect authors to enter their replication study in to the FORRT Replication Database (if it is not included yet). StaRT reports can be imported automatically and do not require author assistance.

Reproductions (same data)

For reproductions (i.e., studies where no new data is collected), we recommend the use of the Institute4Replication’s template available via this OSF Project. We do not accept reproductions with overlapping authorship. Reproductions should expand the original analyses in some way (e.g., generalizability or robustness checks). Simply rerunning code is not sufficient.

Multiverse Analyses and Many Analyst Studies

There are many paths from raw data to results. Approaches that aim to wander most or all of them and compare how robust a finding is to analytic decisions are called multiverse analyses, approaches that involve many people choose their preferred path of data analysis independently and compare them are called Many Analyst Studies. Both contain information about the robustness or generalizability and are thus an integral part of repetitive research.

Multi-study articles

For multi-study articles, a mix of replications and reproductions is possible. If possible, authors should conduct a mini meta-analysis. Authors need to disclose for each study whether it is a replication or reproduction. A mix of original studies and replication is not possible.

Replication Methods

Theoretical contributions to methods of all types of replication reports can be submitted if they are relevant for multiple research areas.

Badges

For articles meeting the requirements listed in the Author Guidelines, we assign the following badges (images provided by OSF):

Student Reports

Articles whose first authors are enrolled at a university at the time of submission can be submitted as Student Report. Submissions need to include a certificate of enrollment at a university for the first author. None of the other authors need to be students. Supervisors do not need to be included as authors but need to be mentioned in the manuscript. Review for student reports is aimed to be faster (two weeks deadline for one review instead of four weeks for two independent reviews). Quality standards are as high as non-student reports. Reviews are still open and articles need to adhere to submission guidelines and TOP guidelines. Please note that students can also submit their articles as non-student reports.

Registered Reports

Replication Research accepts registered reports for studies where new data is collected. More information on registered repots is available in the template guide provided by the OSF.

Reports that are already part of a Meta-Study

A considerable proportion of replications have been conducted as part of a large-scale project (e.g., Reproducibility Project Psychology). In these cases, only the meta-study is reviewed and not the individual articles. Replication Research accepts manuscripts that describe an individual replication even if it has already been part of a published meta-study provided that the manuscript transparently describes the relationship with the specified meta-study.

Contributions and References

These guidelines are shared under a CC 4.0 by Attribution License and are loosely based on the submission guidelines from Meta Psychology (https://open.lnu.se/index.php/metapsychology/about/submissions). For a recommended citation, please see https://osf.io/kupqt/.