Olmo van den Akker
Tilburg University
Co-Authors: Marjan Bakker; Jelte Wicherts; Marcel van Assen
Preregistration in practice: A comparison of published papers and their preregistrations
Preregistration has been touted as one of the main solutions to the so-called ‘crisis of confidence’ in the social sciences because it can restrict researchers’ freedom to p-hack the results of their studies. In this project, we will look at papers that have earned a Preregistration Challenge award (N = 179), papers that have earned a preregistration badge (N = 150), published registered reports (N = 158), and a control group of papers that have not been preregistered (N = 150) to check if and how published studies deviate from their preregistrations, and whether there is an association between the strictness of the different preregistration formats and the reproducibility of published studies. This project will be the largest study to date on preregistration practices and their efficacy and will provide valuable insight that can help to improve preregistration templates and researchers’ preregistration skills.