Conclusion: Research Transparency for a Diverse Discipline

The contributors to this symposium offer important reflections and insights on what research transparency can and should mean for political scientists. In offering these insights, they have drawn on their experience and expertise in a broad range of research traditions that prominently involve one or more “qualitative” methods for gathering or analyzing empirical information. The issues discussed in this symposium, however, are just as important for scholars in research traditions that use primarily or exclusively “quantitative” analytical methods and pre-existing datasets, as we will discuss below. Rather than simply summarize the many important points that each contributor has made, we seek in this concluding essay to map out the conversation that has unfolded in these pages—in particular, to identify important areas of agreement about the meaning of transparency and to illuminate the structure and sources of key disagreements. We also reflect on broader implications of the symposium discussion for the transparency agenda in Political Science. To organize the first part of our discussion, we largely employ the APSA Ethics Guide’s distinction among production transparency (defined as providing an “account of the procedures used to collect or generate data”1), analytic transparency (defined as “clearly explicating the links connecting data to conclusion”2), and data access. These categories are closely related to matters of empirical evidence, and this will also be our primary focus below. We wish to emphasize at the outset, however, that openness in the research process is not solely a matter of how we account for and share data and data-analytic procedures. Research transparency—defined broadly as providing a full account of the sources and content of ideas and information on which a scholar