The transparency of quantitative empirical legal research published in highly ranked law journals (2018–2020): an observational study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Scientists are increasingly concerned with making their work easy to verify and build upon. Associated practices include sharing data, materials, and analytic scripts, and preregistering protocols. This shift towards increased transparency and rigor has been referred to as a "credibility revolution." The credibility of empirical legal research has been questioned in the past due to its distinctive peer review system and because the legal background of its researchers means that many often are not trained in study design or statistics. Still, there has been no systematic study of transparency and credibility-related characteristics of published empirical legal research. Methods: To fill this gap and provide an estimate of current practices that can be tracked as the field evolves, we assessed 300 empirical articles from highly ranked law journals including both faculty-edited journals and student-edited journals. Results: We found high levels of article accessibility (86%, 95% CI = [82%, 90%]), especially among student-edited journals (100%). Few articles stated that a study's data are available (19%, 95% CI = [15%, 23%]). Statements of preregistration (3%, 95% CI = [1%, 5%]) and availability of analytic scripts (6%, 95% CI = [4%, 9%]) were very uncommon. (i.e., they collected new data using the study's reported methods, but found results inconsistent or not as strong as the original). Conclusion: We suggest that empirical legal researchers and the journals that publish their work cultivate norms and practices to encourage research credibility. Our estimates may be revisited to track the field's progress in the coming years.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Metaresearch Domain: Reproducibility · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
| gpt | Metaresearch Domain: Reporting · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | high |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.625 | 0.174 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".