Replication in Strategic Management Journal

New paper suggests the field of strategy is vulnerable to a replication crisis. Publication standards need to change to require data disclosure and facilitate replication.

Bergh, D. D., Sharp, B. M., Aguinis, H., & Li, M. (2017). Is there a credibility crisis in strategic management research? Evidence on the reproducibility of study findings. Strategic Organization, 15(3), 423–436. http://doi.org/10.1177/1476127017701076

Authors attempted to replicate 88 studies published in Strategic Management Journal. About 70% of articles did not provide enough data to replicate findings.

Of the 30% of articles that provided enough data to be retested, about 33% included statistically significant hypotheses that did not replicate. Far more significant results were found insignificant than vice versa.

2018 Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability

https://corporate-sustainability.org/events/10th-annual-arcs-research-conference/

Capture

Random sample of USA federal contracting data

Available on my github page as a CSV or Stata DTA.

A Stata loop to add data source to variable labels

The Stata blog provides a loop to rename variables.

I use this loop to add the data source to variable names when I merge datasets together. Here is the loop for doing that:

foreach var of varlist * {
    local lab `: var label `var''
    label var `var' "(<data source name>) `lab'"
 }

Replace <data source name> with the data source.

Stata and Dropbox

Raymond Hicks has a nice article in The Stata Journal on collaborating in Stata with Dropbox. Article is freely available at http://www.stata-journal.com/article.html?article=pr0058.

Raymond’s faculty page has other statistics resources.

Field Experiments in Organizations

Dov Eden’s review of field experiments in organizations is out at Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior (link).

Abstract

Field experimentation, although rare, is the sterling-gold standard of orga-
nizational research methods. It yields the best internally valid and general-
izable ﬁndings compared to more fallible methods. Reviewers in many psy-
chology specialties, including organizational psychology, synthesize largely
nonexperimental research, warn of causal ambiguity, and call for experi-
mental replication. These calls go mostly unheeded. Practical application
is a raison d’ˆetre for much organizational research. With the emergence of
evidence-based management, ﬁeld experiments enable us to deliver the most
actionable tools to practitioners. This review explicates the role of experi-
mental control and randomization and enumerates some of the factors that
mitigate ﬁeld experimentation. It describes, instantiates, and evaluates true
ﬁeld experiments, quasi-experiments, quasi-ﬁelds, combo designs, and tri-
angulation. It also provides practical tips for overcoming deterrents to ﬁeld
experimentation. The review ends describing the merging of new technolo-
gies with classical experimental design and prophesying the bright future of
organizational ﬁeld experimentation.

What happens when you crowdsource peer review?

Chris Lee at arstecnica covers some academics who are trying it

When this approach was tested (with consent) on papers submitted to Synlett, it was discovered that review times went way down—from weeks to days. And authors reported getting more useful comments from their reviewers.

The forum is open, so as a reviewer, you can see comments accumulating, and you know the editor is going to close comments at some point soon. You are either going to do the job now or not do it at all—you can’t put the editor off for three weeks before deciding that you don’t have time.