Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A psychology study with an AsPredicted record specifying primary outcome and analysis before recruitment.
- Is an instance
A clinical trial registered on ClinicalTrials.gov with primary endpoints fixed before enrolment.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A pre-analysis plan written after looking at the data.
- Not an instance
A research protocol shared only internally.
Editorial commentary
Pre-registration is the practice of publicly time-stamping a study’s hypotheses, design, sample, and planned analysis in a registry before data are collected (or, for secondary-data work, before the analyst gains access to the outcome variables). The registry entry becomes a fixed reference point: any result reported later that matches the registered plan is confirmatory, and anything else — a different outcome measure, an added covariate, a subgroup that was not specified — must be labelled exploratory rather than passed off as a planned test. This is what pre-registration actually buys a research programme: it does not make a finding true, but it makes it possible for a reader to tell which claims were predicted in advance and which were discovered by looking.
Common registries include the OSF Registries platform, AsPredicted (a short-form template popular in psychology and behavioural economics), and, for clinical research, ClinicalTrials.gov and the WHO-recognised national trial registries. Journals increasingly ask for a registration link as a condition of considering a paper confirmatory, and some now implement the TOP Guidelines’ Study Preregistration and Analysis Plan Preregistration standards, which grade how strongly a journal enforces the practice.
How it differs from a pre-analysis plan and a registered report
A pre-analysis plan is a specific, more detailed variant used mainly in economics and political science, where it typically specifies exact statistical models, variable transformations, and inference rules rather than only the broad hypotheses and design pre-registration covers. Every pre-analysis plan is a form of pre-registration; not every pre-registration is detailed enough to count as a pre-analysis plan. A registered report goes a step further still: its Stage 1 protocol is independently peer reviewed before data collection, and a passing review earns an in-principle acceptance that the journal will publish the eventual results regardless of outcome. A self-filed registry entry carries no such review or publication guarantee — it is a transparency record, not an editorial commitment.
Pre-registration does not prevent a researcher from running exploratory analyses; it prevents those analyses from being silently presented as if they had been predicted, which is the mechanism behind p-hacking and HARKing. A registry entry filed after the analyst has already looked at the outcome data is not a genuine pre-registration, whatever the timestamp claims about intent.
References
- Nosek, Ebersole, DeHaven, Mellor, 'The preregistration revolution' (PNAS, 2018).
- OSF Registries, osf.io/registries.
Also known as
preregistration · pre-reg
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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