Registered report

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The registered report (Engl. Registered report ) is part of the certification process from the journals one format to scientific misconduct as harking and p-hacking counter and other problems in testing theory.

Problem

The aim of empirical-quantitative testing of theory (see statistical test ) is to check the applicability of a theory. The traditional peer review process, however, honors results that support a theory in some subject areas, and results that are particularly novel and contradict conventional theories in other subject areas. The impact of such expectations on study results makes theory testing practically useless. Scientific misconduct aimed at meeting such expectations, such as HARKing and p-hacking , exacerbates the problem.

A related problem case is when reviewers or editors ask authors in the context of the review process to use a “more appropriate” theory than originally planned - often to meet the aforementioned expectations of study results. Such demands lead to the fact that authors now look for a “suitable” theory afterwards until it is confirmed by the data. This theory then replaces the original theory in the manuscript and the sequence of building hypotheses - hypothesis testing is inadmissibly reversed. As a result, theories in publications always behave as the reviewers or editors expected anyway. The data not originally collected to test this theory now appears to support these expectations. This establishes theories that are actually more useless than such published articles suggest. This problem case also makes theory testing practically useless.

Procedure

In the case of a registered report, the authors of a study create an application that contains the theoretical and empirical background, research questions and hypotheses, and possibly pilot data. After submitting it to the journal, the application - not the manuscript as usual - will be assessed before the actual data is collected. In the event of a positive review, the manuscript to be prepared after data collection is published regardless of the study results.

Individual evidence

  1. Promoting reproducibility with registered reports. In: Nature Human Behavior. 1, 2017, p. 34, doi : 10.1038 / s41562-016-0034 .
  2. Streamlined review and registered reports soon to be official at EJP - ejp-blog.com (English)