Submissions

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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.
  • Preprint uploaded to a non-commercial repository (e.g., Zenodo, ArXiv), accessible, and assigned a DOI.
  • Cover letter includes preprint DOI, at least two reviewer suggestions, list of badges that the authors apply for (data, code, materials, registration), reference to the reporting guideline(s) used by the authors, and optionally request for Social Responsibility Evaluation and request for results-blind peer review (reproductions only).
  • The Preregistration link is accessible and included in manuscript (if the study was preregistered). If the study was not preregistered but contains data analyses, the authors included a statement declaring that it was not preregistered.
  • All deviations from the preregistration are disclosed and discussed (if the study was preregistered).
  • Data, materials, and code have been made openly available and accessible by linking them in the manuscript. If sharing certain materials is not feasible (e.g., due to ethical, privacy, or legal considerations), authors should clearly state the reasons and, where possible, describe how access requests or alternatives can be handled. Our editorial team is committed to supporting authors in addressing any challenges with data sharing. Please note that if open materials are removed post-publication without valid justification, this may lead to retraction of the article.
  • Instructions for reproducibility checks provided and linked in the manuscript.
  • All authors agree that in case of acceptance the paper including all corresponding materials will be published under a CC BY 4.0 attribution license by the journal. Bibliographic metadata including abstracts will be published under a CC0 license. Copyright remains with the authors.
  • All authors agree with the manuscript's content, the order of the authors, the CRediT statement, and Replication Research's policies.
  • Authors have included a brief subsection ‘Social Impact & Responsibility’ (see the "SIR" in the constitution for details: https://www.uni-muenster.de/Ejournals/index.php/replicationresearch/constitution).
  • Manuscript includes statements on potential conflicts of interests and funding for all contributors.
  • If applicable, an ethics statement from the institutional review board is submitted.
  • The authors confirm that they have the legal right to publish all figures, images, and data included in the manuscript; that all sources and ideas from others are appropriately cited to avoid plagiarism; and that they take full responsibility for any violations of copyright or ethical standards related to their submission.

Author Guidelines

Replication Research is a peer-reviewed journal 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.

Authors seeking guidance regarding reproduction and replication studies can consult FORRT's handbook for reproduction and replication studies (https://forrt.org/replication_handbook).

  • Pre-Submission checks
    We encourage authors to conduct automated 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).
  • Preprints
    Before submission, articles must be posted to a preprint 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
    We recommend studies to be preregistered and justify exceptions. If applicable, 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. For preregistered studies, the authors must disclose whether the analysis plan was included in the preregistration and whether the analysis script was preregistered, and whether they already had access to the data by the time they 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 should 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 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 (“We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions (if any), all manipulations, and all measures in the study.”) 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 drafted by ChatGPT 5”). Finally, for empirical submissions, authors should 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 reproducible. 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. Replication Research will conduct reproducibility checks that adhere to the CODECHECK principles.
  • 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 confusion with expressions of concern prevalent on PubPeer.
  • 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. To prevent long publication times, an unformatted “online first” version of the article will be published before the final layout is ready.

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.

Badges

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

  • Open Materials
  • Open Data
  • Open Code
  • Preregistered
  • Code works

Reproductions (same data)

For reproductions (i.e., studies where no new data is collected), we recommend using the Institute for Replication’s template available via this OSF Project or FORRT’s Standardized Reproduction Template (StaRT, long or short form). We do not accept reproductions with overlapping authorship with the authorship team of the original article. Reproductions should expand the original analyses in some way (e.g., generalizability or robustness checks). Numerical reproductions (e.g., rerunning the code) are not accepted. Authors can propose results-blind peer-review for reproduction studies via an informal request in the submission’s cover letter.

Replications (different data)

Replication studies test a previously published claim or hypothesis using different data from 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. Replication articles should provide subjective author assessment and guideline-based assessment of success (for guidance, see our Handbook). If possible, authors should also include a reproduction of the original study. We generally recommend reproduction before replication.

Upon acceptance, we expect authors to enter their replication study into the FORRT Replication Database (if it is not included yet; form).

Multiverse Analyses and Many Analyst Studies

There are many paths from raw data to results. Approaches that aim to explore most or all of these paths and compare how robust a finding is to analytic decisions, among other factors, are called multiverse or specification curve analyses; Approaches that systematically vary choices regarding analysis, variable and sample selection approaches that involve many people choosing their preferred path of data analysis independently and comparing them are called Many-Analyst Studies. Both contain information about 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. Authors need to disclose for each study whether it is a replication or reproduction. A mix of original studies and replication is not possible.

Registered Reports

Replication Research accepts registered reports for studies where new data is collected. More information on registered reports is available in the guide to registered reports.

Replication Reviews

Replication Reviews can be meta-analyses and reviews that focus on replications and reproductions (e.g., to aggregate the state of replicability across a field of literature). For meta-analyses of replications, we recommend including a meta-analysis of the original effects which is being replicated alongside the meta-analysis of replications, and eventually a pooled meta-analysis of both original and replication studies. Replications or reproductions of meta-analyses should be submitted to the Replications or Reproductions section.
We do not accept articles that estimate replicability across a body of original literature statistically, using methods such as z-curve or p-curve, as they do not constitute repetitive research (i.e., but would be acceptable as part of a larger project). Instead, the focus is on the accumulation of evidence from replication/reproduction studies.

Replication Methods and Perspectives

Theoretical contributions to methods of all types of replication research should be relevant to multiple research areas. These papers may introduce and validate new methods, or discuss the role and limitations of repetitive research in a specific context (e.g., the quality of reproduction studies in undergraduate theses).

Tutorials

Practical introductions to methods or tools relevant for conducting repetitive research.

Comments

Replication Research welcomes comments on articles published in our pages. If several comments make similar points, the editors will select one for review. Authors will be given the opportunity to submit one aggregated Reply to comments.

Copyright Notice

All articles and corresponding materials are published under a CC BY 4.0 license. For special cases involving ethical or legal restrictions, there is the option to provide access to the data only to the journal.

Contributions and References

These guidelines are shared under a CC BY 4.0 and have been created by the members of the R2 editorial board. They are loosely based on the submission guidelines from Meta Psychology and Free Neuropathology. 

Privacy Statement

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