## 5.1. What to report about your data and methods

The cardinal rule in the writing of your data and methods sections is that your research should be replicable (Nosek et al., 2015). Be open and transparent in the description of your research. Assume that a climatologist who knows nothing about the methods and data that you have used would try to replicate your research. What pieces of information would she need?

Right. All of them. Remember Einstein (Figure 17).

So:

1. Report the procedure you (or others) have used to recruit your research participants.
2. Describe all the selections you have made to get from the target population to the group of actual research participants.
3. Report the order in which and the conditions in which the participants completed the study. Were they tested in a classroom, in individual sessions, at home, in the lab or in class? Who was present during the interview? What promises were made to participants about confidentiality or anonymity?
4. Report the data collection mode: paper and pencil questionnaire, face-to-face personal interview, computer assisted personal interview, computer assisted web interview.
5. Report the topic list for your interviews.
6. Report the survey instruments you have used by referring to previous research describing them or better still: print the items in an appendix.
7. Report for each variable in your causal model how you measured it. What did you do exactly with the variables from the original data file?
8. Provide your data (without personal identifiers) to your supervisor and put them in a public repository, such as the Open Science Framework (OSF).
9. Provide the code (SPSS syntax, Stata do-file, R script) with commands that make the data ready for analysis and produce the empirical results you report to your supervisor. Put it in a public repository.

In writing your thesis, you do not have to select which details to describe and which to omit – simply describe them all. Make all the materials you used (interview guides, topic lists, questionnaires, instructions for participants, stimulus materials) available in appendices and put them online, for instance in a project on the Open Science Framework. See the next section for a step-by-step guide.

When you are reworking your thesis into an empirical journal article, make sure you follow the guidelines and common practice in the journal to which you are submitting your article. Not all of these details are typically included in empirical journal articles; sometimes they are described in online supplementary materials, or they not disclosed at all. You will have to make selections. The journal may force you to keep only one or a few tables, and only one or a few figures. This is a bad practice that hinders progress and replicability in science. Whatever you present in the main text, make sure you do include all materials in the manuscript you submit to the journal, and include a DOI link to the preprint version. Create an ‘online supplementary materials’ appendix if possible. Certainly present all materials through a link to your project page.