[From the article “More and more scientists are preregistering their studies. Should you?” by Kai Kupferschmidt, published in Science]

“…Preregistration, in its simplest form, is a one-page document answering basic questions such as: What question will be studied? What is the hypothesis? What data will be collected, and how will they be analyzed? In its most rigorous form, a “registered report,” researchers write an entire paper, minus the results and discussion, and submit it for peer review at a journal, which decides whether to accept it in principle. After the work is completed, reviewers simply check whether the researchers stuck to their own recipe; if so, the paper is published, regardless of what the data show.”

“…Several databases today host preregistrations. The Open Science Framework, run by COS, is the largest one; it has received 18,000 preregistrations since its launch in 2012, and the number is roughly doubling every year. The neuroscience journal Cortex, where Chambers is an editor, became the first journal to offer registered reports in 2013; it has accepted 64 so far, and has published results for 12. More than 120 other journals now offer registered reports, in fields as diverse as cancer research, political science, and ecology.

“…Still, the model is not attractive to everyone. Many journals are afraid of having to publish negative results, Chambers says. And some researchers may not want to commit to publishing whatever they find, regardless of whether it supports a hypothesis.”

“….There are other drawbacks…”

“…It’s not easy to tell how real preregistration’s potential benefits and drawbacks are. Anne Scheel of the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, for instance, recently set out to answer a seemingly simple question: Do registered reports lead to more negative results being published? “I’m quite shocked how hard it is,” says Scheel.”

“…For preregistration to be a success, the protocols need to be short, simple to write, and easy to read, Simmons says. That’s why in 2015 he, Nelson, and Simonsohn launched a website, aspredicted.org, that gives researchers a simple template for generating a preregistration.”

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