Assessing the evidentiary value of secondary data analyses: a commentary on Gangestad, Dinh, Grebe, Del Giudice, and Thompson (2019)

Secondary data analyses (analyses of open data from published studies) can play a critical role in hypothesis generation and in maximizing the contribution of collected data to the accumulation of scientific knowledge. However, assessing the evidentiary value of results from secondary data analyses is often challenging because analytical decisions can be biased by knowledge of the results of (and analytical choices made in) the original study and by unacknowledged exploratory analyses of open data sets (Scott & Kline, 2019; Weston, Ritchie, Rohrer, & Przybylski, 2018). Using the secondary data analyses reported by Gangestad et al. (2019) as a case study, we outline several approaches that, if implemented, would allow readers to assess the evidentiary value of results from secondary data analyses with greater confidence.