Use as Directed? A Comparison of Software Tools Intended to Check Rigor and Transparency of Published Work

TL;DR

This study compares 11 automated tools designed to assess rigor and transparency in scientific publications, highlighting their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement to enhance reproducibility.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive evaluation of existing tools across multiple criteria, offering insights and recommendations for future development.

Findings

Tools vary in effectiveness across different criteria.

Combining tools improves detection of certain transparency issues.

Identifies key areas for tool development focus.

Abstract

The causes of the reproducibility crisis include lack of standardization and transparency in scientific reporting. Checklists such as ARRIVE and CONSORT seek to improve transparency, but they are not always followed by authors and peer review often fails to identify missing items. To address these issues, there are several automated tools that have been designed to check different rigor criteria. We have conducted a broad comparison of 11 automated tools across 9 different rigor criteria from the ScreenIT group. We found some criteria, including detecting open data, where the combination of tools showed a clear winner, a tool which performed much better than other tools. In other cases, including detection of inclusion and exclusion criteria, the combination of tools exceeded the performance of any one tool. We also identified key areas where tool developers should focus their effort to make their tool maximally useful. We conclude with a set of insights and recommendations for stakeholders in the development of rigor and transparency detection tools. The code and data for the study is available at https://github.com/PeterEckmann1/tool-comparison.