Preregistration

 

The Preregistration Prescriptiveness Trade-Off and Unknown Unknowns in Science: Comments on Van Drimmelen (2023)

I discuss Van Drimmelen’s (2023) Metascience2023 presentation on researchers’ decision making during the research process. In particular, I consider his evidence that researchers’ discretion over research decisions is unavoidable when they follow …

When Does HARKing Hurt? Identifying When Different Types of Undisclosed Post Hoc Hypothesizing Harm Scientific Progress

Hypothesizing after the results are known, or HARKing, occurs when researchers check their research results and then add or remove hypotheses on the basis of those results without acknowledging this process in their research report (Kerr, 1998). In …

Practical guides on open science for researchers in the Netherlands

A recently published series of open science guides help researchers in the Netherlands navigate open science. They cover topics such as pre-prints, open licenses, questionable publication practices (forthcoming) and how to apply open science in …

Evaluation of Transparency and Openness Guidelines in Physical Therapy Journals

Objective The goals of this study were to evaluate the extent that physical therapy journals support open science research practices by adhering to the Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines and to assess the relationship between journal …

Do p values lose their meaning in exploratory analyses? It depends how you define the familywise error rate

Several researchers have recently argued that p values lose their meaning in exploratory analyses due to an unknown inflation of the alpha level (e.g., Nosek & Lakens, 2014; Wagenmakers, 2016). For this argument to be tenable, the familywise error …

Does preregistration improve the credibility of research findings?

Preregistration entails researchers registering their planned research hypotheses, methods, and analyses in a time-stamped document before they undertake their data collection and analyses. This document is then made available with the published …

Paths in strange spaces: A comment on preregistration

This is an archived version of a blog post on preregistration. The first half of the post argues that there is not a strong justification for preregistration as a tool to solve problems with statistical inference (p-hacking); the second half argues …

Preregistration, Replication, and Nonexperimental Studies

In last month’s column, I worried about whether encouraging us to preregister our hypotheses and analysis plan before running studies would stifle discovery. I came to the conclusion that it needn’t — but that we need to guard against letting the …

Preregistration: the good, the bad, and the confusing

Preregistration is a tool to enhance the reliability of science that has been promoted as a normative requirement for the award of grants or the acceptance of publications. I argue that: (a) preregistration addresses an important need, (b) it offers …

Why Preregistration Makes Me Nervous

I must admit that when I first heard of the effort to get psychological scientists to preregister their studies (that is, to submit to a journal a study’s hypotheses and a plan for how the data will be analyzed before that study has been run), I had …
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