v2026.1CASRAI Dictionary 1,610 entries across 24 domains · CC-BY 4.01,610 entries · CC-BY 4.0

Dictionary termTrack CStablev2026.2

Robustness

The stability of a study's conclusions under reasonable variations in analytical choices, model specification, sample inclusion, or measurement, on the same data.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 21 May 2026

Ask about Robustness

Answers are drawn from this dictionary entry and the rest of the CASRAI corpus, with a link to every source.

Answers are AI-generated from CASRAI’s own published pages and can be wrong, so check the linked sources before relying on one; your question is logged without personal data — never sold, never used to train a third-party model — to show us what CASRAI is missing, so please do not type personal or confidential details. How we use this

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
A regression result that holds whether outliers are winsorised, trimmed, or kept.
Is an instance
A model conclusion that survives swapping the random-effects structure.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A new experiment on new data (replicability).
Not an instance
Running the same code twice (reproducibility).

Editorial commentary

Robustness checks alter one degree of freedom at a time (e.g., re-running with covariate X removed, using a different estimator, excluding outliers) to test whether the headline conclusion is artefactual. The multiverse-analysis literature generalises this by running all plausible analytic paths simultaneously rather than only one.

References

Steegen, Tuerlinckx, Gelman, Vanpaemel, 'Increasing transparency through a multiverse analysis' (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2016).

Also known as

analytic robustness · specification robustness

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Robustness"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/robustness" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/robustness",
  "name": "Robustness",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/robustness",
  "description": "The stability of a study's conclusions under reasonable variations in analytical choices, model specification, sample inclusion, or measurement, on the same data.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/reproducibility#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/robustness",
  "sameAs": [
    "analytic robustness",
    "specification robustness"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-05-21T02:22:49",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

View CASRAI adoption →