Purpose

The purpose of today’s lab is to walk through how to create a pre-registration on the Open Science Framework. Rather than serve as a step-by-step tutorial, this page will mostly contain links to other resources on pre-registration and open science that you can use when drafting your own preregistrations, along with a few questions/prompts to guide our discussion.

Note: A lot of the material in this document has been copied (or adapted) from pregistration workshops by Moin Syed (https://osf.io/pm8bh/) and Cassie Brandes (https://osf.io/pm8bh/).

Overview of preregistration

What?

Why?

When?

How?

Types of preregistration

Source: https://osf.io/t4p9g/

Group exercise: “Find the flexibility”

Click here.

Components of a pregistration

Background

Method

Analysis Plan

Exploratory Analysis

Example preregistration

Click here.

FAQ

Sources: OSF Slide Decks; Association for Psychological Science

1. What do I need to do when writing up my preregistered study?

  • Include a link to your preregistration
  • Report results of all pre-registered analyses
  • Any unregistered analyses must be transparent

See here and here for more resources from the Center for Open Science on what to include when reporting the results of preregistered research.

2. What if I need to change my research plan?

  • If you decide to make changes to your analysis plan after looking at your data/results, be sure to still report what you said what you were originally going to do, and you can still report your unplanned analyses, but you must indicate that these were unplanned.

  • If you decide to make changes before seeing your data, you can withdraw your original preregistration and create a new plan.

3. Can’t someone “scoop” my ideas?

  • Date-stamped preregistrations make your claim verifiable
  • By the time you’ve preregistered, you are ahead of any possible scooper.
  • Embargo your preregistration

4. Isn’t it easy to cheat?

e.g. Making a “preregistration” after conducting the study; Making multiple preregistrations and only citing the one that “worked.”

  • While fairly easy to do, this makes fraud more intentional. Preregistration helps keep you honest to yourself

  • Preregistration does not assume dishonesty. HARKing and similar practices that preregistration cures typically are unintentional rather than deliberate. Preregistration helps us remember (and show others) what we actually planned.

5. Isn’t preregistration a ton of extra work?

  • Preregistration certainly involves an investment of time “up front”, but it can save you time later on when writing your manuscript.
  • Basically, once you have written a preregistration, you will have written most of the methods section.
  • Sharing your preregistration and study materials openly will make it easier for others (or yourself) to reproduce your work later on.

Any questions/concerns?

Resources