How open is communication science? Open-science principles in the field

Abstract

ABSTRACT Open-science principles, such as open data, shared materials, and pre-registration, are expected to encourage a culture of replication in scientific research. Yet, with its topical and methodological heterogeneity, communication science has been described to fall short of such principles. We analyze the extent to which open-science principles were used in publications from 20 leading communication journals between 2010 and 2020, and compare the results to benchmarks from psychology. Results show that open-science principles were little used in communication science with some variation across methods, but were more consistently used in psychology papers. There was no relationship with scientific impact. This suggests a need for greater attention to open-science principles in communication science, while considering their appropriateness for different study designs.