Publication
Computational social science has expanded the capacity of scientists to study connected human behavior at previously unprecedented scales. Yet from its beginning, scientists expressed concern that its reliance on private companies might produce a body of work that cannot be critiqued or replicated. Such commercial determinants of science have been observed in other fields including public health where science has implications for corporate liability. In this meta-scientific report, we analyze the population of computational social science articles about technology platforms published in three general scientific journals to investigate commercial determinants of scientific replicability in computational social science. We find that only 26% of those papers can be replicated today, and that 34% of computational social science studies published in leading general scientific journals rely on special arrangements with corporations that are impossible to replicate without special permission. We find that articles relying on API access, scraping or access to nonprofit platforms have much higher potential for replication. These findings are consistent with broader literature on the commercial forces that determine the direction and reliability of science.
NetSI authors
