Conclusion: Research transparency for diverse discipline

The contributors to this symposium offer important reflections and insights on what research transparency can and should mean for political scientists. In offering these insights, they have drawn on their experience and expertise in a broad range of research traditions that prominently involve one or more “qualitative” methods for gathering or analyzing empirical in-formation. The issues discussed in this symposium, however, are just as important for scholars in research traditions that use primarily or exclusively “quantitative” analytical methods and pre-existing datasets, as we will discuss below.
Rather than simply summarize the many important points that each contributor has made, we seek in this concluding essay to map out the conversation that has unfolded in these pages—in particular, to identify important areas of agreement about the meaning of transparency and to illuminate the struc-ture and sources of key disagreements. We also reflect on broader implications of the symposium discussion for the trans-parency agenda in Political Science.