Preregistration boils down to “stating as clearly and specifically as possible what you plan to do, and how, before doing it, in a manner that is verifiable by others”. By submitting your research plans into a registry you enable peers to review your hypothesis, improving transparency and quality of your research. The general idea of preregistration is that you publish a detailed overview of your research plan before looking at your collected data. This does not mean that your ideas have to be carved in stone! However, you can use preregistration as a tool to get to a detailed research plan and you can always adapt your ideas after preregistering them.

Types of preregistration

• Preregistration (unreviewed preregistration)
• Registered reports (reviewed preregistration)
• Registered replication reports

You can find more information on the different types and questions regarding preregistration here.

More about:

• Preregistration: What? Why? How? (blog post by the MPI CBS Open Science Initiative)
• The Preregistration Revolution (publication focusing on the importance of preregistration)

Tools:

• As Predicted (preregistration through a fairly simple and structured template)
• OSF (various formats from very well-structured to completely flexible)

Templates:

• OSF: Templates of OSF Registration Forms (general information about OSF templates)
• OSF: Preregistration Outreach Packet Wiki (example preregistrations by discipline and study type)
• OSF: Secondary Data Preregistration (template and instructions for registering a research project that uses an existing dataset)
• OSF: Preregistration for Qualitative Research Template (a project to encourage the use of preregistrations among researchers who use qualitative methods, based on Haven & van Grootel: Preregistering Qualitative Research)