Online appendices detailing the robustness of empirical analyses are paramount but they never let readers explore all reasonable researcher degrees of freedom. Simonsohn, Simmons and Nelson suggest a ‘specification curve’ that allows readers to eyeball how the main coefficient of interest varies across a wide arrange of specifications. I build on this idea by making it interactive: A shiny-based web app enables readers to explore the robustness of findings in detail along the whole curve.
Following up on a recent blog article that discussed how to use R to explore your researcher degrees of freedom, this post introduces a specification curve plot as suggested in Simonsohn, Simmons and Nelson. With this plot, you can eyeball how various researcher degrees of freedom affect your main outcome of interest.