Registered Reports: a process to safeguard high-quality evidence

Excerpt

From the perspective of an individual researcher, Registered Reports may appear as little more than yet another article format—a format with an unusual workflow, perhaps, but ultimately just a slightly different route for one’s research to enter the published record. From the perspective of a scientific claim, however, Registered Reports are much more than that: They establish a new standard for evidence quality. A hypothesis that is upheld in a Registered Report has survived a process that was highly potent at finding any flaws with it. First, the method used to test the hypothesis was vetted in peer review and judged capable of providing an informative test before the results were known. Second, the criteria the data had to pass to be counted as supporting the hypothesis were predefined and left minimal room for the evidence to be presented as stronger than warranted (e.g. due to capitalising on chance). And third, the results would have been published in the same place even if they had contradicted the hypothesis. …