Can we trust our published research? The reproducibility of research published in major real estate journals

Since John P.A. Ioannidis published his article “Why Most Published Research Findings are False” (Ioannidis, 2005), substantial evidence has accumulated that science and research in their current form have a problem with replicability and reproducibility of their published findings. The discussion initially focused on psychology and medicine, but in the meantime, we know that other natural and social science disciplines are affected as well (Baker, 2016). This issue goes to the heart of science and research, as it undermines the credibility of theoretical concepts that build on those findings and may call into question substantial parts of accumulated scientific knowledge. Most alarmingly, these are not random anomalies but are related to basic elements of our traditional research paradigm. The discussion of a “reproducibility crisis” in science and research feeds directly into Open Science initiatives and ideas that have emerged as a new paradigm in publicly funded research in recent years. Open knowledge transfer is discussed in the context of the European Research Area (ERA), and national knowledge transfer strategies include open science commitment between public and private sectors. At the international level UNESCO provides an international framework for open science policy and practice aiming at technological and knowledge-based harmonization between and within countries. The framework includes a set of agreed standard setting steps, such as promoting a shared understanding of open science, investment in infrastructure and resources. Thus, there is international commitment on promoting and implementing open science into research and there is more awareness in publicly funded research. To our knowledge, these issues have thus far been largely ignored in Real Estate. We basically do not know whether there is a “reproducibility crisis” in Real estate as well and if so, how large it is. With our paper we want to take a first step toward answering this question. The paper will examine the publishing behavior of researchers in real estate journals and aim at identifying whether and how researchers provide access to their research designs, data and results. This can be seen as a prerequisite for reproducible research. Only when authors fully disclose these elements, one can even try to replicate their research. In this article, we will concentrate on access to the data. We select articles published in major main real estate outlets within the period 2022-24. For obvious reasons, we concentrate on empirical papers and exclude purely theoretical and conceptual contributions. By use of data-mining methods, we identify all text areas that contain the string “data”. Then, we read through these text areas and categorize the article by clarity of the provided information about data sources, availability of those data and the level of difficulty by which other researchers can access those data. In the end, we hope to be able to reach a lower bound for the percentage of non-reproducible publications in Real estate.