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Category: Project

Description: The pre-registration of a scientific study can improve the transparency of scientific research and protect against bias in the form of researcher degrees of freedom. For this reason, we aim to conduct an in-depth investigation into the field of audiology through a comparison with the field of ophthalmology, since vision and hearing are comparable areas of allied healthcare and are both research areas covering a single, primary, sensory organ. Additionally, we also perform a comparison with popular and well-researched area, namely neuroscience, which is strongly related to audiology because the neurological processing of sounds primarily occurs in the brain. We hereby investigate the proportion of pre-registered publications in the three fields using two complementary methods. 1. The first method is examining ten peer-reviewed journals chosen through the Web of Science web page., The journals selected will be the ten with the highest impact factors, identified through the Journal Citation Reports database in each discipline. Identifying pre-registered studies by searching for the keywords "registered protocol", "registration", and "registered" and “protocol" in all text fields for all years from 2012 to 2022, and then calculating the percentage by comparing them to the total number of publications for that year. In addition, the practice of pre-registering studies will be evaluated year by year for the three areas: whether it is increasing faster in audiology or not, compared to neurosciences and ophthalmology. 2. The second method is searching through commonly used registration databases and websites (i.e., Open Science Framework, Clinical Trials, PROSPERO, and ISRCTN) and comparing the number of pre-registrations in these to the number of articles published in PubMed using the same keywords search in all databases. Moreover, pre-registered studies in these three areas will also be examined to see how audiology compares to the other fields and whether the number of pre-registrations has risen over the years