| Abstract: |
Since John P.A. Ioannidis published his article “Why Most Published Research
Findings are False” (Ioannidis, 2005), substantial evidence has accumulated
that science and research in their current form have a problem with
replicability and reproducibility of their published findings. The discussion
initially focused on psychology and medicine, but in the meantime, we know
that other natural and social science disciplines are affected as well (Baker,
2016). This issue goes to the heart of science and research, as it undermines
the credibility of theoretical concepts that build on those findings and may
call into question substantial parts of accumulated scientific knowledge. Most
alarmingly, these are not random anomalies but are related to basic elements
of our traditional research paradigm. The discussion of a “reproducibility
crisis” in science and research feeds directly into Open Science initiatives
and ideas that have emerged as a new paradigm in publicly funded research in
recent years. Open knowledge transfer is discussed in the context of the
European Research Area (ERA), and national knowledge transfer strategies
include open science commitment between public and private sectors. At the
international level UNESCO provides an international framework for open
science policy and practice aiming at technological and knowledge-based
harmonization between and within countries. The framework includes a set of
agreed standard setting steps, such as promoting a shared understanding of
open science, investment in infrastructure and resources. Thus, there is
international commitment on promoting and implementing open science into
research and there is more awareness in publicly funded research. To our
knowledge, these issues have thus far been largely ignored in Real Estate. We
basically do not know whether there is a “reproducibility crisis” in Real
estate as well and if so, how large it is. With our paper we want to take a
first step toward answering this question. The paper will examine the
publishing behavior of researchers in real estate journals and aim at
identifying whether and how researchers provide access to their research
designs, data and results. This can be seen as a prerequisite for reproducible
research. Only when authors fully disclose these elements, one can even try to
replicate their research. In this article, we will concentrate on access to
the data. We select articles published in major main real estate outlets
within the period 2022-24. For obvious reasons, we concentrate on empirical
papers and exclude purely theoretical and conceptual contributions. By use of
data-mining methods, we identify all text areas that contain the string
“data”. Then, we read through these text areas and categorize the article by
clarity of the provided information about data sources, availability of those
data and the level of difficulty by which other researchers can access those
data. In the end, we hope to be able to reach a lower bound for the percentage
of non-reproducible publications in Real estate. |