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Category: Project

Description: Researchers face many, often seemingly arbitrary choices in formulating hypotheses, designing protocols, collecting data, analyzing data, and reporting results. Opportunistic use of ‘researcher degrees of freedom’ aimed at obtaining statistical significance increases the likelihood of obtaining false positive results and overestimated effect sizes, and lowers the replicability of published results. Preregistration is a mechanism for reducing such degrees of freedom by specifying designs and analysis plans before observing the research outcomes. The effectiveness of preregistration may depend, in part, on whether the process facilitates sufficiently specific articulation of such plans. We compared two formats of preregistration available on the OSF: Standard Pre-Data Collection Registration and Prereg Challenge registration. The Prereg Challenge format provides detailed instructions, a guided workflow, and an independent review to confirm completeness; the “Standard” format has minimal direct guidance to give researchers flexibility for what to pre-specify. Results of comparing random samples of 53 preregistrations from each format indicate that neither format restricted all researcher degrees of freedom and the Prereg Challenge format performed better on restricting degrees of freedom than the “Standard” format. Preregistering research is an acquired skill, and registration formats that provide effective guidance will improve the quality of research.