Background and rationale
Over the past decade, the replication and credibility crisis has become a defining challenge across the social sciences, including management research. Numerous studies have failed to replicate, raising questions about robustness, transparency, and the incentives driving scholarly publication. Management journals are responding to the challenge. For instance, Organization Science, Management Science, and The Leadership Quarterly have raised their methodological and transparency standards, requiring authors to provide preregistrations, share data and code, and demonstrate scientific rigour.
While experienced Master’s students (e.g., research master), PhD students and early career scholars are increasingly aware of these issues, they often lack the practical knowledge, training, and encouragement needed to integrate credible practices into their own research. Many doctoral programs still provide limited formal training in open science or replication, leaving a gap between awareness and action.
This summer school is designed to bridge that gap. By combining conceptual insights with hands-on practice, it empowers participants to adopt credibility-enhancing practices early in their careers, positioning them to produce research that is both publishable in leading journals and impactful for organisations and society.
Schedule
The program is structured around five thematic days, each focusing on a critical dimension of credible management research.
Day 1
Setting the Stage – Understanding the Credibility Crisis
The opening day introduces participants to the credibility crisis and its implications for management scholarship. A keynote lecture explores the “credibility revolution” in the social sciences, highlighting replication failures and their impact on theory and practice. A follow-up lecture examines common threats to credibility in management research, including questionable research practices (QRPs) such as p-hacking, selective reporting, and HARKing (hypothesising after results are known).
In the afternoon, participants analyse simulated data to observe how QRPs can distort findings and work in small groups to critically evaluate a published study for credibility issues. The day concludes with an informal networking reception, fostering connections among participants and faculty.
Day 2
Transparency and Open Science – Making Research Reproducible
Building on the first day’s conceptual foundation, Day 2 introduces open science practices as practical solutions to enhance research credibility. Topics include preregistration, registered reports, and data and code sharing.
Participants engage in a hands-on workshop using the Open Science Framework (OSF) to create their own preregistration templates, either for ongoing projects or hypothetical studies. A guest session from a journal editor provides insights into how top-tier journals evaluate transparency and how replication studies can contribute to theory building.
Day 3
Research Design for Credible Inference – Ensuring Robustness
Day 3 focuses on methodological rigor and how research design choices influence credibility. A lecture introduces principles of causal inference in management research, covering key designs such as experiments and quasi-experiments (e.g., difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity).
Afterwards, participants can select two out of four research designs (field experiments, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, and instrumental variables) for a more in-depth introduction. We will offer two parallel sessions, each focusing on one of the four research designs.
The afternoon workshop allows participants to apply these methods in a stats lab format, where they implement causal identification strategies on example datasets. Emphasis is placed on robustness checks and sensitivity analyses, equipping participants to defend their findings against alternative explanations.
Day 4
Replication – Accumulating Knowledge Credibly
Day 4 highlights the role of replication in cumulative science. Participants learn about different types of replications (direct, conceptual, constructive) and discuss challenges and opportunities for publishing replication work in management journals.
In workshops, students design their own replication studies, either based on existing published work or their own research interests.
Day 5
Credibility and Your Career – Applying Lessons to Your Own Research
The final day integrates lessons from the week and connects them with participants’ ongoing projects and career development. In the morning, participants refine their research ideas and prepare short pitches emphasising how credibility and rigour are embedded in their designs.
The program culminates in group presentations, where participants present their credible research proposals and receive constructive feedback from faculty and peers.
In the afternoon, we organise a “meet-the-editor” panel in which participants can engage in discussions about research credibility with editors of management journals. A closing keynote addresses the future of credible management science, inspiring participants to act as ambassadors for rigorous and transparent research in their own institutions and scholarly communities.
