Smailes David, Aleksandra Arnela, Coakley Megan, Mair Susan, Ventress Joe
Department of Psychology, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England.
Content Delivery and Copyright, Student, Library and Academic Services, Northumbria University, England.
PLoS One. 2025 May 22;20(5):e0324514. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0324514. eCollection 2025.
Concerns over the trustworthiness of the research findings generated in Psychology (as well as other disciplines) has led to calls for the adoption of practices that make research more open, transparent, and reproducible. One of these practices is the open sharing of research materials, such as task stimuli. There is some evidence that, generally, the uptake of this practice has been slow in Psychology. The aim of this study was to examine the availability/findability of the stimuli used in a sample of papers that investigated the effect of exposure to images from social media on participants' body image, as this may be a field where progress in the open sharing of task stimuli may be especially slow. We coded the method sections of 38 studies (published across 36 articles from 2012 to 2021) in terms of the availability/findability of the images they employed and found that in only two articles were we able to fully access task stimuli. We also found no evidence that the sharing of images used as task stimuli had increased over time. We discuss likely reasons for this reticence to share task stimuli in this field, the impact this has on reproducibility, replicability, and research waste, and ways in which this issue can be addressed. All study materials and data are available at doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/wpvst.
对心理学（以及其他学科）研究结果可信度的担忧，促使人们呼吁采用能让研究更开放、透明和可重复的做法。其中一种做法是公开分享研究材料，比如任务刺激物。有证据表明，总体而言，心理学领域对这种做法的采用一直很缓慢。本研究的目的是考察在一组研究社交媒体图片曝光对参与者身体意象影响的论文样本中，所使用刺激物的可获取性/可查找性，因为在这个领域，任务刺激物的公开分享进展可能特别缓慢。我们根据所采用图片的可获取性/可查找性，对38项研究（发表于2012年至2021年的36篇文章中）的方法部分进行了编码，发现只有两篇文章中的任务刺激物我们能够完全获取。我们还没有发现证据表明用作任务刺激物的图片分享随时间有所增加。我们讨论了该领域不愿分享任务刺激物的可能原因、这对可重复性、可复制性和研究浪费的影响，以及解决这个问题的方法。所有研究材料和数据可在doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/wpvst获取。
