Documentation requirements in political science journals: Moving towards open access practices

Abstract

This article explores the incidence of open science in academic research in the field of Political Science. Open science’s goal is to shed light on information about data, research procedures, and results of academic work, thus making information accessible to reviewers and the general public. This practice is not prevalent across the social sciences although there is increasing interest on the importance of reproducibility in building or rejecting theory and knowledge. However, important epistemological and methodological debates have evolved around the feasibility and desirability of adopting these practices as a standard in the discipline. This article systematically collects and analyzes data on publishing requirements of the top journals in the fields at point, including pre-registration. We also provide a state of the art on the implementation of these best practices in Latin America.