Citation

Hansford HJ, Cashin AG, Wewege MA, Ferraro MC, McAuley JH, Jones MD. Knee Surg. Sports Traumatol. Arthrosc. 2022; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s00167-022-06893-9

PMID

35092443

Abstract

In recent years there has been a 'crisis of confidence' or 'reproducibility crisis' in many areas of science including psychology [1], neuroscience [2] and social science [3]. These issues stand to reduce confidence in the findings of science from those fields, potentially resulting in wasted research funding, resources and effort [4]. The field of sports science is not immune to these issues, with several appeals to improve research quality and move the field forward [5,6,7]. Research transparency and openness are essential to adequately appraise, replicate, and implement research findings into clinical practice and health policy. Greater transparency and openness in sports science research is needed to increase the confidence in research findings and aid reproducibility.

Sports science journals can support researchers to publish more transparent and open research [8, 9] by implementing practices such as requiring pre-registration [10], reporting guidelines [11] and sharing of data and code [12, 13]. Journal policies that actively support transparent and open research practices can improve the quality, reproducibility and replicability of the research they publish [14, 15]. For example, a change to editorial policy in the Nature life-science journals introducing a reporting checklist led to improved reporting of the risk of bias for in vivo research [15]. The Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines [16] provide an excellent overview of the key areas and practices journals should support to improve research transparency and openness.

To illustrate this issue, we appraised how well the policies of the leading 38 sports science journals support transparent and open research practices. These journals...

Language: en

Keywords

Open science; Replicability; Transparency