Improving Reproducibility in Epidemiology

Reproducibility is crucial to the scientific method. We provide ten steps epidemiologists at any career level can take to improve the reproducibility of their work. The ten steps encompass multiple aspects of epidemiological research including conceptualization, execution, and description and support all parts of the epidemiological study pipeline: from drafting a study protocol to publishing research outputs and submitting manuscripts to open access journals. For each step, we outline concerns that epidemiologists may have before taking the step (dubbed issues and pitfalls) and how taking the step is expected to benefit the epidemiologists and the field of epidemiology generally (dubbed solutions and reasoning). We provide an example of an epidemiological investigation that was reproduced (badger culling in the United Kingdom) and evaluate how well the original work and the reproduced work fulfill the ten steps to improved reproducibility in epidemiology.