Why we need pre-registration
There has been a chorus of disapproval this week at the suggestion that researchers should 'pre-register' their studies with journals and spell out in advance the methods and analyses that they plan to do. Those who wish to follow the debate should look at this critique by Sophie Scott, with associated comments , and the responses to it collated here by Pete Etchells. They should also read the explanation of the pre-registration proposals and FAQ by Chris Chambers - something that many participants in the debate appear not to have done. Quite simply, pre-registration is designed to tackle two problems in scientific publishing: Bias against publication of null results A failure to distinguish hypothesis-generating (exploratory) from hypothesis-testing analyses Either of these alone is bad for science: the combined effect of both of them is catastrophic, and has led to a situation where research is failing to do its job in terms of providing credible answers to scientific q...