22 What is a registered report?
A registered report is a study format in which the proposal (and often much of the final paper) is peer-reviewed before the research is undertaken. This enables focus on the importance of the question and the experimental procedure, rather than the results, in assessing its suitability for publication.
Journals that accept registered reports will typically accept the study for publication based on the lodged report, with data collection and the final write-up occurring after acceptance.
Registered reports offer several benefits:
- They provide a strong form of pre-registration, reducing bias in the production of research.
- They reduce publication bias because the decision to publish occurs before results are known.
- They typically require archival of materials important for replicating or reproducing the results.
- They enable feedback on the design at a time when it can improve the experiment.
One important subtype is the registered replication report, which is a registered proposal to replicate an experiment. Registered replication reports often involve multiple laboratories to enable many independent replications to be aggregated into a single publication.
22.1 Example
In (Mazar et al., 2008), students were induced to reduce cheating by citing honour codes before completing a test.
(Verschuere and Others, 2018) proposed a replication. Their registered replication report was submitted for review before data collection. It was written as though the data had already been collected, with space left to insert the results after analysis.