Scientific studies of language span across many disciplines and provide evidence for social, cultural, cognitive, technological, and biomedical studies of human nature and behavior. By becoming increasingly empirical and quantitative, linguistics has been facing challenges and limitations of the scientific practices that pose barriers to reproducibility and replicability. One of the proposed solutions to the widely acknowledged reproducibility and replicability crisis has been the implementation of transparency practices, e.g. open access publishing, preregistrations, sharing study materials, data, and analyses, performing study replications and declaring conflicts of interest. Here, we have assessed the prevalence of these practices in randomly sampled 600 journal articles from linguistics across two time points. In line with similar studies in other disciplines, we found a moderate amount of articles published open access, but overall low rates of sharing materials, data, and protocols, no preregistrations, very few replications and low rates of conflict of interest reports. These low rates have not increased noticeably between 2008/2009 and 2018/2019, pointing to remaining barriers and slow adoption of open and reproducible research practices in linguistics. As linguistics has not yet firmly established transparency and reproducibility as guiding principles in research, we provide recommendations and solutions for facilitating the adoption of these practices.

Scientific studies of language span across many disciplines and provide evidence for social, cultural, cognitive, technological, and biomedical studies of human nature and behavior. By becoming increasingly empirical and quantitative, linguistics has been facing challenges and limitations of the scientific practices that pose barriers to reproducibility and replicability. One of the proposed solutions to the widely acknowledged reproducibility and replicability crisis has been the implementation of transparency practices, e.g. open access publishing, preregistrations, sharing study materials, data, and analyses, performing study replications and declaring conflicts of interest. Here, we have assessed the prevalence of these practices in randomly sampled 600 journal articles from linguistics across two time points. In line with similar studies in other disciplines, we found a moderate amount of articles published open access, but overall low rates of sharing materials, data, and protocols, no preregistrations, very few replications and low rates of conflict of interest reports. These low rates have not increased noticeably between 2008/2009 and 2018/2019, pointing to remaining barriers and slow adoption of open and reproducible research practices in linguistics. As linguistics has not yet firmly established transparency and reproducibility as guiding principles in research, we provide recommendations and solutions for facilitating the adoption of these practices.

To solve many cooperative problems, humans must have evolved the ability to solve physical problems in their environment by coordinating their actions. There have been many studies conducted across multiple different species regarding coordinating abilities. These studies aim to provide data which will help illuminate the evolutionary origins of cooperative problem solving and coordination. However, it is impossible to make firm conclusions about the evolutionary origins of coordinating abilities without a thorough comparative analysis of the existing data. Furthermore, there may be certain aspects of the literature that make it very difficult to confidently address evolutionary and meta-analytic questions. This study aimed to rectify this by using meta-analysis, phylogenetic analysis and systematic review to analyse the data already obtained across multiple studies, and to assess the reliability of this data. We found that many studies did not provide the information necessary for meta-analysis, or were not comparable enough to other studies to be included in analyses, meaning meta-analyses were underpowered or could not be conducted due to low samples of both studies and different species. Overall, we found that many studies reported small positive effects across studies, but the standard errors of these effects frequently traversed zero.

To solve many cooperative problems, humans must have evolved the ability to solve physical problems in their environment by coordinating their actions. There have been many studies conducted across multiple different species regarding coordinating abilities. These studies aim to provide data which will help illuminate the evolutionary origins of cooperative problem solving and coordination. However, it is impossible to make firm conclusions about the evolutionary origins of coordinating abilities without a thorough comparative analysis of the existing data. Furthermore, there may be certain aspects of the literature that make it very difficult to confidently address evolutionary and meta-analytic questions. This study aimed to rectify this by using meta-analysis, phylogenetic analysis, and systematic review to analyse the data already obtained across multiple studies, and to assess the reliability of this data. We found that many studies did not provide the information necessary for meta analysis, or were not comparable enough to other studies to be included in analyses, meaning meta analyses were underpowered or could not be conducted due to low samples of both studies and different species. Overall, we found that many studies reported small positive effects across studies, but the standard errors of these effects frequently traversed zero.