School of Public Health Assistant Professor Julian Wolfson was named an associate editor for reproducibility for the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA). The appointment is in support of the journal’s new requirement for authors to submit scientific code and data for review along with their papers.

The journal said it’s adding the editors and requirement to ensure the reproducibility of scientific results reported in its studies. The move follows similar action recently taken by many medical journals.   

“Reproducibility is a hot topic and there’s been a lot of back-and-forth about it among clinical trials and open-science researchers,” says Wolfson, who has extensive experience in statistical programming.

JASA says the code and data from published studies will be offered mainly through its website, and the aim of the review work by Wolfson and the editorial team is to assess the information’s availability, quality, and potential usability for people wanting to reproduce research.