There are multiple lines of evidence suggesting that transparency is often insufficient in ecology and evolution. Much of this evidence was outlined in a review in 2016. For other citations, see our Links & References page.

In short:

• Archiving of data remains uncommon when not required, and is often poorly done when it is required.
• Archiving of analysis code is rare.
• Basic statistical information (such as sample size or estimates of variation) is often missing from published papers.
• There is strong indication that, at least in some disciplines, published results are a biased subset of all analyses.
• Replication of earlier work is rare, and so hypotheses with poor explanatory value are not discarded as readily as we might expect.
• Many ecologists and evolutionary biologists acknowledge using practices known to bias the distribution of effects published in the scientific literature