Neuroscience Research Guide

Pre-registration is the process of documenting one’s plans for a study and depositing those plans in a place where they are time-stamped and immutable (i.e. cannot be changed). There are various types of pre-registration:

Standard pre-registration: An investigator documents their plans in writing and submits them to a pre-registration service. This documents the researcher’s plans prior to undertaking the research and provides investigators and reviewers with a way to distinguish a priori hypotheses from post-hoc exploratory analyses. The document may be kept private for some period of time but is usually made public upon submission of the manuscript for publication.

Registered reports: An investigator writes a manuscript describing the motivation for a study and a detailed description of the methods, and submits it to a journal for peer review prior to undertaking the research. The manuscript is reviewed based on the importance of the research question and the quality of the methods. If accepted, the journal agrees to publish the paper regardless of the results, assuming that there are no problems with the implementation of the methods.

Registered replication report: A type of registered report in which the investigators wish to attempt to replicate a particular published finding, usually involving multiple research sites.

Source:  Stanford Psychology Guide to Open Science 

Why is Pre-registration So Important?

• It forces the researcher to plan & think through both why and how they pursuing their research question question
• It provides the researcher with a way to determine whether a hypothesis was truly held a priori, versus relying upon memory
• It forces the researcher to think through their analysis plan in more detail, potentially surfacing issues that could influence the design of the study
• It helps prevent data-dependent decisions (including “p-hacking”) and establish credibility by avoiding the garden of forking paths: it’s a solution to p-hacking
• Helps prevent selective reporting of measures

Source:  Stanford Psychology Guide to Open Science 

While an overwhelmingly large number of neuroscience pre-registrations, generally speaking, are housed at ClinicalTrails.gov (example), Princeton researchers who are not conducting clinical studies should consider registering with OSF Registries (example). 

OSF Registries has a number of pre-registration templates to choose from (complete list here).

You might also consider the pre-registration Template from David Mellor from the Center for Open Science,

• David Mellow (Center for Open Science) Pre-registration for Neuroscience. Presented at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Conference, 2017. [video 19:58]