The emergence of the replication crisis has placed the integrity of research across the social and behavioral sciences under increased scrutiny. While awareness among the community has grown in recent years, in the field of communication science, proactive action has lagged, and replication studies remain relatively scarce.
Our project, funded within the DFG Priority Program META-REP, focuses on a young and dynamic subfield of communication science, Computational Communication Science (CCS).
This project aims to tackle the persistent challenges in the replicability and reproducibility of CCS research by introducing a proactive approach centered on automation approaches and what we call front-loading effort. Specifically, our goal is to develop field-specific protocols and semi-automated tools for authors, reviewers, and editors that can facilitate checks during the submission and review process and, thus, contribute to improving the reproducibility and replicability of CCS research.
In this presentation, we will introduce the project and its work plan and share the current progress, including some first results from our community survey among CCS researchers and a prototype of our tools.