Instead of "playing the game" it is time to change the rules: Registered Reports at AIMS Neuroscience and beyond

By Christopher D. Chambers, E. Feredoes, Suresh D. Muthukumaraswamy, P. Etchells. 2014

217 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The last ten years have witnessed increasing awareness of questionable research practices (QRPs) in the life sciences [1,2], including p-hacking [3], HARKing [4], lack of replication [5], publication bias [6], low statistical power [7] and lack of data sharing ([8]; see Figure 1). Concerns about such behaviours have been raised repeatedly for over half a century [9–11] but the incentive structure of academia has not changed to address them. Despite the complex motivations that drive academia, many QRPs stem from the simple fact that the incentives which offer success to individual scientists conflict with what is best for science [12]. On the one hand are a set of gold standards that centuries of the scientific method have proven to be crucial for discovery: rigour, reproducibility, and transparency. On the other hand are a set of opposing principles born out of the academic career model: the drive to produce novel and striking results, the importance of confirming prior expectations, and the need to protect research interests from competitors. Within a culture that pressures scientists to produce rather than discover, the outcome is a biased and impoverished science in which most published results are either unconfirmed genuine discoveries or unchallenged fallacies [13]. This observation implies no moral judgement of scientists, who are as much victims of this system as they are perpetrators.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e0f8897b3a057437353f1f15e7f40255da84120

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Citations in the corpus

The preregistration revolution (2018, background): “io/rr/) is offered by dozens of journals to facilitate preregistration (59, 60).”
Pre-registration in social psychology—A discussion and suggested template (2016, background): “Some of these have been discussed already (e.g., in a recent editorial at AIMS Neuroscience, Chambers et al., 2014).”
Mindfulness and acceptance approaches to sporting performance enhancement: a systematic review (2017, background): “Most top-quality journals in medicine (De Angelis et al., 2004) and some in psychology (Chambers et al., 2014) are no longer accepting research without a registered protocol, and many others are requiring that authors follow reporting checklists like TIDieR (Hoffmann et al., 2014) and CONSORT…”
The Scientific Method in the Science of Machine Learning (2019, background): “In at least 165 journals, pre-registered studies may publish results, positive or negative, as a peer-reviewed registered report (Center for Open Science; Nosek & Lakens, 2014; Chambers et al., 2014).”
The psycho Package: an Efficient and Publishing-Oriented Workflow for Psychological Science (2018, background): “These factors contribute to the reproducibility crisis in psychological science (Chambers et al. 2014, Etz and Vandekerckhove (2016), Szucs and Ioannidis (2016)).”
An open investigation of the reproducibility of cancer biology research (2014, unknown): “The project follows a protocol similar to the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (Open Science Collaboration, 2012, 2014), and—in conjunction with eLife—adopts an approach in which the proposed experiments and protocols are written up in a Registered Report that is peer reviewed and published prior”
Reporting animal research: Explanation and Elaboration for the ARRIVE guidelines 2019 (2019, methodology): “For example, in the Registered Report format offered by an increasing number of journals, protocols undergo peer review and if accepted, the journal commits to publishing the completed research regardless of the results obtained [220].”
Transparency, Reproducibility, and the Credibility of Economics Research (2018, unknown): “Several psychology journals currently have begun using results-blind review, either regularly or in special issues (Chambers 2013; Chambers et al. 2014; Nosek and Lakens 2014).32 A forthcoming issue of Comparative Political Studies will be the first to feature results-blind review in political…”
Promoting Open Science to Increase the Trustworthiness of Evidence in Special Education (2018, background): “See Chambers et al. (2014) for responses to common concerns about Registered Reports.”