Metascience Analyses and Explorations of Reproducibility In Cardiovascular Science

Small teams of summer students work under the guidance of a CVI early career scientist to conduct a metascience study in the field of cardiovascular research. Teams use open and reproducible methods to survey published cardiovascular articles about how research is being conducted. Teams ultimately create a database of screened articles and a public protocol, or pre-registration, about their study.

What is Metascience?

What happened in 2023?

What happened in 2022?

What happened in 2021?

MAvERICS Roadmap

Contributors

Goals

• Provide summer students and early career researchers with training in rigorous and reproducible scientific methods
• Provide summer students with an improved understanding of cardiovascular literature and best practices in cardiovascular research
• Opportunity for early career researchers, such as postdocs, residents, medical students, and graduate students, to learn teaching and mentorship skills, as well as how to plan and lead a project from start to finish
• Provide summer students with additional research opportunity to complement their primary research project
• Create public datasets and studies that ultimately lead to new scientific knowledge

Program Overview

The MAvERICS Program runs concurrently with the 10-week CVI Summer Research Program. Teams of 4 summer students work under the supervision of an early career researcher (e.g. postdoc, resident, medical student, graduate student) to perform a meta-research study in the field of cardiovascular science. A metascience, or meta-research, study is an investigation of the practice of science; such as a study into data sharing practices, or the reporting of biological sex as a variable (see eLife examples.)

MAvERICS projects start with the generation of metascience research question. Before the program starts, early career scientists - or team leads - plan the project with the support of CVI administrative staff and/or faculty advisors. During the first few weeks of the program, the team leads work with their students to finalize the research question and scope. The team then creates a database of articles to screen using a protocol designed to answer the research question. At the end of the summer each team should have a complete article database as well as a public protocol that describes their study, its hypotheses, the data collection and screening process, as well as the plan for future analyses. Throughout the summer, students will receive training in reproducible research methods through workshops and seminars.

MAvERICS projects start with the generation of metascience research question. The team then creates a database or articles to screen using a protocol designed to answer that question. The majority of the program is spent screening papers and preparing a public protocol of how the data was collected and how it may be analyzed in the future. At the end of the summer, each MAvERICS team will have a database of screened articles as well as a sharable protocol describing the study.

Example Projects

Below are the sort overviews and links to four projects that MAvERICS teams completed in the summers of 2021, 2022, and 2023.

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