"Pre-register if you want to"

Just reading a nice short article by one of my favourite academics Don Moore on pre-registration. Having been considering to pre-register one of my coming experiments, this helped me to make up my mind. Hope it will be useful to those also in two minds of to pre-register or not to pre-register. Here is the link to the article https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27042885

If you do not have subscription to APA here are few of the key points of the article:

"This resistance [to pre-registration] is largely driven by three concerns. First, skeptics fear pre‐registration would constrain their creativity and the serendipity of scientific discovery. ... Do you want to run an exploratory test? You can register it as such; or do not bother registering it at all. Take what you learn from that test, design a better study, and pre‐register that. "

"Second, skeptics worry that pre‐registration brings added scrutiny to their research reporting. ... Your scholarly colleagues will reward you by lending greater credence to your research results if you pre‐register your predictions."

"Third, pre‐registration adds another effortful step in the research process already overburdened requirements from institutional review boards and grant funders. ... Most of these are not particularly laborious, but you are not even bound to these twenty [components asked for pre-registration]. You can pre‐register whatever you want."

"Would pre‐registration rule out the possibility of reporting other tests? Certainly not. But it clarifies the distinction between confirmatory and exploratory tests. "

Here is a link to the pre-registration website well at least one of them that I found to be the easiest. https://cos.io/prereg/ Play around and explore how the pre-registration works.

If you are still not convinced, then at least you are informed.

22/11/2018