Pre-registration: Weighing costs and benefits for researchers

• Published in: Organizational behavior and human decision processes Vol. 167; pp. 18 - 27
• Main Authors: Logg, Jennifer M., Dorison, Charles A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.11.2021
• Subjects: Methodology; Open science; Pre-registration; Replication; Replication; Pre-registration; Open science; Methodology
• ISSN: 0749-5978; 1095-9920
• DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2021.05.006

•Many papers prescribe pre-registration to increase the credibility of research.•Pre-registration lags the adoption of other open science practices in OBHDP.•Who: We report the descriptive reality of adoption across generations.•Why: Researchers are uncertain about pre-registration’s individual-level benefits.•Why: We clarify how pre-registration benefits individual researchers.•How: We provide a guide for how to pre-register, comparing different resources. In the past decade, the social and behavioral sciences underwent a methodological revolution, offering practical prescriptions for improving the replicability and reproducibility of research results. One key to reforming science is a simple and scalable practice: pre-registration. Pre-registration constitutes pre-specifying an analysis plan prior to data collection. A growing chorus of articles discusses the prescriptive, field-wide benefits of pre-registration. To increase adoption, however, scientists need to know who currently pre-registers and understand perceived barriers to doing so. Thus, we weigh costs and benefits of pre-registration. Our survey of researchers reveals generational differences in who pre-registers and uncertainty regarding how pre-registration benefits individual researchers. We leverage these data to directly address researchers’ uncertainty by clarifying why pre-registration improves the research process itself. Finally, we discuss how to pre-register and compare available resources. The present work examines the who, why, and how of pre-registration in order to weigh the costs and benefits of pre-registration to researchers and motivate continued adoption.