Registered Reports: A Method to Increase the Credibility of Published Results
📄 Original study ↗Plain English Summary
What if scientific journals judged a study's worth before anyone peeked at the results? That's the big idea behind Registered Reports, introduced here in a landmark special issue of Social Psychology -- the first journal issue anywhere made up entirely of pre-registered replication studies. Researchers submitted their plans upfront, got peer-reviewed on methodology alone, locked in their designs publicly, and then collected data with publication guaranteed no matter what happened. This flips the usual incentive structure, where surprising or positive findings get published and boring-but-honest null results gather dust. The reform was partly sparked by controversies like Bem's famous precognition paper, which highlighted how flexible methods and publication bias can warp science. It's now a cornerstone of the credibility revolution reshaping psychology and beyond.
Research Notes
Foundational methodology paper for the replication crisis and open science movement. First implementation of Registered Reports format in psychology. Directly relevant to psi research methodology debates - Bem's Feeling the Future (2011) catalyzed these reforms. Essential for understanding how psi researchers have adopted pre-registration (GCP, presentiment studies) to address methodological criticisms. Connects to reproducibility project and credibility revolution in psychology.
This editorial introduces Registered Reports, a novel publishing format that incorporates peer review and preregistration of designs before data collection. The authors present the first known journal issue in any discipline consisting exclusively of pre-registered replication studies: a special issue of Social Psychology with 15 articles. The process involved issuing calls for proposals (36 received), peer review of full proposals (24 encouraged, 14 accepted), and OSF registration prior to data collection with publication guaranteed irrespective of results. This approach shifts incentives to evaluate methodological quality rather than results, addressing the publication bias against replications and negative results that undermines scientific credibility.
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Related Papers
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- Measuring the Prevalence of Questionable Research Practices With Incentives for Truth Telling — John, Leslie K (2012)
- Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science — Open Science Collaboration (2015)
- Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience — Button, Katherine S (2013)
- The Garden of Forking Paths: Why Multiple Comparisons Can Be a Problem, Even When There Is No "Fishing Expedition" or "P-Hacking" and the Research Hypothesis Was Posited Ahead of Time — Gelman, Andrew (2013)
- Options for Prospective Meta-Analysis and Introduction of Registration-Based Prospective Meta-Analysis — Watt, Caroline A (2017)
- Scientific Utopia: II. Restructuring Incentives and Practices to Promote Truth Over Publishability — Nosek, Brian A (2012)
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📋 Cite this paper
Nosek, Brian A, Lakens, Daniël (2014). Registered Reports: A Method to Increase the Credibility of Published Results. Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000192
@article{nosek_2014_registered,
title = {Registered Reports: A Method to Increase the Credibility of Published Results},
author = {Nosek, Brian A and Lakens, Daniël},
year = {2014},
journal = {Social Psychology},
doi = {10.1027/1864-9335/a000192},
}