Having recounted Philip N. Cohen’s audits of the American Sociological Review and found them overstated, the obvious next question is whether he meets the standard he applies to other people.
He does.
The frame is his curriculum vitae. Screening it for peer-reviewed empirical articles with quantitative analysis published between 2015 and 2025 gives twenty papers. That window covers the years in which open science became half his public program.
The rule is the one frozen for the ASR recount. Count an article when publicly accessible code appears, without executing it, to cover the article’s quantitative results, and the data are either included or obtainable by outside researchers through a documented procedure that does not run through the authors. Restricted data do not disqualify; discretionary data do. Partial coverage does not count. No code was run.
The first result was unexpected. Not one of the twenty articles appeared in a journal that required public deposit at the time of publication.
That took some establishing. Sociological Science requires a replication package now, and its policy applies to manuscripts submitted after April 1, 2023; Cohen’s article there appeared in January 2016. Wiley announced its tiered framework in September 2017, after his 2016 article in The Sociological Quarterly, and left the tier to each journal. Elsevier encouraged rather than mandated. Springer Nature says its general policy requires a data availability statement and introduces no sharing mandate. Sage operates tiers and distinguishes journals that require public sharing from journals that encourage it; no Sage title in this set was in the mandatory group at the relevant date.
Seven of the twenty were subject to a statement requirement.
So every package Cohen posted across eleven years was posted without a journal compelling it. Thirteen of the twenty articles have one. Sixty-five percent.
On sole-authored papers he is seven for seven. Every one. He is also one for one as first author of a multi-author paper. The gaps sit further down the author list: four of nine as second author, one of two as third, none of the one where he is fourth.
That distribution is what you would expect if deposit tracks whoever ran the analysis and assembled the files. It also means the seven-for-seven figure is the one that speaks to his own practice, and the rest speaks to his coauthors’.
The trajectory tracks his public program. Through 2017 he is one of five. From 2018 forward, the years in which he launched SocArXiv and began arguing in public about transparency, he is twelve of fifteen. His two 2015 papers, with Jeehye Kang in the Journal of Family Issues and with Lucia Lykke in Social Currents, have no packages and no data availability statements. His 2025 article on views of falling birth rates carries a statement pointing at the Pew source data and an OSF repository for the code.
The man changed his practice when he started telling other people to change theirs. That is the least he could have done and it is more than the record shows for most people who argue about this in public.
Three cautions. Twenty articles is a small denominator and the authorship cells run to one and two papers; nothing here supports a claim about how coauthorship affects deposit in general. The venue finding is a negative search across twenty journal-years, well supported by the publisher framework documents and still an absence rather than a positive record. And the rule I applied is his 2023 rule, which is stricter than his 2025 one; under the looser standard his rate would be higher.
The easy charge against a man who audits other people is that he would not survive his own audit. Cohen survives it. On the papers where he alone decided, he survives it completely, in years when no journal asked him to.
That makes the criticism in the other piece more interesting rather than less. The problem with his 2025 audit is that he changed the ruler between two measurements and read the difference as movement, which is a failure of the method rather than of the man, and which the man’s own thirty years of work would have caught in anybody else.
The ASR case ledger gives the coding rule this census applies.
What follows is the venue ledger behind the census: for each of the twenty articles, the journal’s requirement at the date of publication and the source establishing it. All checks August 26, 2026.
Jeehye Kang and Philip N. Cohen published in the Journal of Family Issues in September 2015. No public deposit, code deposit or pre-publication check requirement was located for that date, and the article carries no data-availability statement. Sage’s later research-data framework distinguishes journals that require public sharing from journals that encourage it, and no evidence places this title in the mandatory group in 2015.
Lucia C. Lykke and Philip N. Cohen published in Social Currents in September 2015. No deposit, code, statement or check requirement was located, and the article carries no data-availability statement.
Cohen published alone in Sociological Science on January 25, 2016. The journal has no deposit requirement applicable to that date; its mandatory replication-package policy applies to manuscripts submitted after April 1, 2023.
Jill E. Yavorsky, Philip N. Cohen and Yue Qian published in The Sociological Quarterly, online July 20, 2016. No public-deposit requirement was located. Wiley announced its tiered framework on September 14, 2017, fourteen months later, and left each journal to choose among encouragement, expectation and mandate.
Jeehye Kang and Philip N. Cohen published in Social Science and Medicine in April 2017. No public-deposit requirement was located. Elsevier’s November 30, 2016 initiative implemented data-citation standards to encourage sharing without mandating deposit, and its general policy describes sharing as encouraged unless a journal adopts a stronger rule.
Philip N. Cohen and Joanna R. Pepin published “Unequal Marriage Markets” in Socius in August 2018, with a voluntary OSF package. No public-deposit requirement was located. The contemporaneous Socius article “Institutionalizing Transparency” discusses stronger journal policies as reforms to be adopted rather than describing a rule the journal already had.
Cohen published “The Coming Divorce Decline” in Socius in August 2019. No public-deposit requirement was located; Sage’s guidance as catalogued in September 2019 supported data sharing rather than requiring it.
Brandon G. Wagner, Kate H. Choi and Philip N. Cohen published in Socius in December 2020 and supplied an OSF package. No public-deposit requirement was located.
Joanna R. Pepin and Philip N. Cohen published “Nation-Level Gender Inequality and Couples’ Income Arrangements” in the Journal of Family and Economic Issues in 2020. The title sat under Springer Nature’s general policy, which asks authors to supply documentation on request rather than to deposit publicly.
Cohen published alone in the European Journal of Environment and Public Health in June 2020 and linked data and code at OSF. No deposit, code or check requirement was located.
Jeehye Kang, Philip N. Cohen and Feinian Chen published in Child Indicators Research, online in 2020. No mandatory public-deposit rule was located. Springer Nature’s single statement policy arrived on March 22, 2023, more than two years later, and requires statements rather than deposit.
Cohen published “The Rise of One-Person Households” in Socius in December 2021, with data and code at OSF. No public-deposit requirement was located.
Cohen published alone in Social Determinants of Health in February 2022. No deposit, code, statement or check requirement was located. The OSF package was already public with the December 2021 preprint.
Cohen published “Rethinking Marriage Metabolism” in Population Research and Policy Review in 2023. A data-availability statement was required or being implemented under the March 2023 policy, which encourages repository deposit while permitting statements that describe restricted data. Public deposit was not required. Package.
Mónica L. Caudillo, Andrés Villarreal and Philip N. Cohen published in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2023. No mandatory public-deposit rule was located for this title at this date, and the published record supplies no qualifying package.
Joanna R. Pepin and Philip N. Cohen published in Socius in 2024. A data-availability statement appears in the article and the replication materials are linked voluntarily at GitHub. No deposit mandate was verified.
Hao-Chun Cheng and Philip N. Cohen published in Asian Population Studies in 2024. Taylor and Francis’s basic policy encourages a statement and data sharing without requiring deposit, and no evidence places this title in a mandatory tier. Package
Ansgar Hudde and Philip N. Cohen published in Socius in 2024. The statement links code, output, GSS and IPUMS data, with materials at OSF. No mandatory public-deposit rule was located.
Hangqing Ruan, Melody Ge Gao, Yajie Xiong and Philip N. Cohen published in Socius in 2024. A statement rule may have applied; no mandatory deposit rule was located, and no qualifying replication package was located as of the check date.
Cohen published alone in Socius in 2025. The statement links the Pew source data and code at OSF. Sage’s policy prescribes what a statement must contain and distinguishes that from the stronger rule imposed by journals requiring repository deposit.
