Transparency & Reproducibility for a Review (arsoc-transparency-and-reproducibility)
When to trigger
The synthesis is settled and you must show how the literature was searched and selected
The review reports a quantitative synthesis (meta-analysis, meta-regression, citation analysis) of its own
A Committee member or referee is likely to ask "how did you decide what to include?"
You want the coverage account to pre-empt the predictable "you omit literature X" pushback
What "transparency" means in a review with no primary data
An ARSoc review reports no new data of its own, so the usual replication-package machinery (raw data, estimation code, a reproducibility README of your analysis) does not apply to the review's claims about the world. Transparency instead bites on two things you do produce:
The coverage account — a documented, near-PRISMA-style record of how the literature was searched, screened, and selected. This is what makes "comprehensive" a verifiable claim rather than a boast.
Any analysis the review itself runs — if the review contributes a meta-analysis, a citation/bibliometric analysis, or a re-coded dataset of studies, that artefact must be reproducible and depositable like any quantitative work.
Distinguish the two clearly: you are not defending an identification strategy of your own (there is none); you are documenting how you found and weighed others' work, and reproducing any synthesis you actually computed.
The coverage account (near-PRISMA, adapted for sociology)
Carry forward the saturation log from arsoc-literature-synthesis into a brief, sharable record:
Element
What to document
Databases & dates
Sociological Abstracts, Web of Science, Scopus, JSTOR, Google Scholar — with search dates
Search terms & traditions
keyword strings and the theoretical-tradition names swept
Inclusion / exclusion
what counted (years, methods/modes, languages, publication types) and what was excluded and why
Mode coverage
how qualitative, computational, demographic, and theoretical work were captured (not just quant)
Saturation
where forward/backward snowballing stopped yielding new must-cites
Counts
rough numbers screened vs. discussed, so "comprehensive" is auditable
Sociology reviews are rarely strict PRISMA systematic reviews, but a near-PRISMA narrative of the search makes the coverage defensible and is increasingly expected. Confirm whether the topic warrants a formal PRISMA flow on the author pages (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准).
When the review runs its own analysis
If the review contributes a meta-analysis or bibliometric study:
Deposit data + code in a public repository (OSF, Dataverse, Zenodo) so the synthesis is reproducible; cite the DOI.
State the protocol: inclusion criteria, effect-size extraction, coding rules, weighting, heterogeneity and publication-bias diagnostics.
Pool only commensurable studies — never reduce qualitative or theoretical work to a spurious effect size (see arsoc-tables-figures).
Make the coding reproducible: a second coder could re-derive your study-level codes from your codebook.
