ArticlePLoS biology2020
Ensuring the quality and specificity of preregistrations.
Article in PLoS biology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Brain Association Studies in 2024: A Systematic Review of Sample Sizes and Preregistrations.Psychophysiology · 2026Pooled it
- A scoping review of the health effects of fermented foods in specific human populations and their potential role in precision nutrition: current knowledge and gaps.Frontiers in nutrition · 2025Pooled it
- Vitamins formed by microorganisms in fermented foods: effects on human vitamin status-a systematic narrative review.Frontiers in nutrition · 2025Pooled it
- Immediate efficacy of low-intensity focused ultrasound versus planar ultrasound in patients with myofascial pain syndrome of upper trapezius: a randomized controlled clinical trial.BMC musculoskeletal disorders · 2025Trial
- Ten particularly frequent and consequential questionable research practices in quantitative research: Bias mechanisms, preventive strategies, and a simulation-based framework.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Assessing Questionable and Responsible Research Practices in Psychology Master's Theses.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The struggle to make transparency mainstream: initial evidence for a slow uptake of open science practices in PhD theses.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Ending publication bias: A values-based approach to surface null and negative results.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Transparency in Cognitive Training Meta-analyses: A Meta-review.Neuropsychology review · 2025Review
- The academic impact of Open Science: a scoping review.Royal Society open science · 2025Review
- Article
- Novelty, Consistency, Transparency: The Trilemma of Psychological Sciences and its Consequences on Open Science Practices.International review of social psychology · 2025Article
- The need to consider auxiliary assumptions in preregistration practices.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Practical routes to preregistration: a guide to enhanced transparency and rigour in neuropsychological research.Brain communications · 2025Review
- Article
- Open Science Practices in Psychiatric Genetics: A Primer.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2024Review
- Open Science 2.0: Towards a truly collaborative research ecosystem.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Reducing bias in secondary data analysis via an Explore and Confirm Analysis Workflow (ECAW): a proposal and survey of observational researchers.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- How do psychology researchers interpret the results of multiple replication studies?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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 and publishing false-positive results and overestimated effect sizes. 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. In this preregistered study, we compared 2 formats of preregistration available on the OSF: Standard Pre-Data Collection Registration and Prereg Challenge Registration (now called "OSF Preregistration," http://osf.io/prereg/). The Prereg Challenge format was a "structured" workflow with detailed instructions and an independent review to confirm completeness; the "Standard" format was "unstructured" with minimal direct guidance to give researchers flexibility for what to prespecify. Results of comparing random samples of 53 preregistrations from each format indicate that the "structured" format restricted the opportunistic use of researcher degrees of freedom better (Cliff's Delta = 0.49) than the "unstructured" format, but neither eliminated all researcher degrees of freedom. We also observed very low concordance among coders about the number of hypotheses (14%), indicating that they are often not clearly stated. We conclude that effective preregistration is challenging, and registration formats that provide effective guidance may improve the quality of research.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.