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

Dictionary termTrack CStablev2026.2

Robustness check

An additional analysis, supplementary to the headline result, that varies one or more analytical choices in order to demonstrate that the main conclusion is not artefactual to those choices.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 21 May 2026

Ask about Robustness check

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 presented with and without country fixed effects.
Is an instance
A trial outcome reanalysed under per-protocol and intention-to-treat populations.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A new experiment on a new sample (replication).
Not an instance
Re-running the same code (reproducibility).

Editorial commentary

Robustness checks include alternative estimators, alternative samples, dropped covariates, transformed outcomes, and bootstrap resampling. They are most informative when pre-specified; ad hoc robustness checks chosen after seeing the main result can themselves be a form of garden-of-forking-paths.

References

Leamer, 'Specification Searches: Ad Hoc Inference with Nonexperimental Data' (Wiley, 1978).

Also known as

sensitivity analysis

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

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

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/robustness-check",
  "name": "Robustness check",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/robustness-check",
  "description": "An additional analysis, supplementary to the headline result, that varies one or more analytical choices in order to demonstrate that the main conclusion is not artefactual to those choices.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/reproducibility#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/robustness-check",
  "sameAs": [
    "sensitivity analysis"
  ],
  "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 →