I was first approached about editing at Evolutionary Human Sciences (EHS) at the EHBEA meeting in Pecs, Hungary. I’d recently started submitting my own Registered Reports (RRs) and was enthusiastic about helping to spread what I was finding to be an incredibly valuable new format for doing and reporting science. But as I spoke to other people at the conference about whether they’d consider submitting a registered report, I found most had either never heard of them, confused them with pre-registration, or were already convinced that RRs were not possible or desirable for the type of work they do.

So what is a Registered Report? It is a way to combat publication bias and research practices that erode statistical inference (if applicable) by having reviewers give their input to a piece of research before a study is run or analysed and having the journal make a firm commitment to publish the completed work, no matter how the results turn out. If you’ve ever had the frustrating experience of having reviewers tell you that you should have just collected this one piece of extra information to make your study publishable, tried to argue against “helpful” suggestions for post-hoc analyses that are clearly meant to support someone else’s agenda, or tried to publish a null result, then RRs are for you.

After explaining this the several people at EHBEA, most saw the value for experimental work where the data hadn’t been collected yet, but argued that this would be impossible for the type of work they do, which might involve ongoing longitudinal data collection or archival data. However, RRs are entirely compatible with secondary data analysis. We do ask that authors explicitly confirm that they have had no prior access to the specific data needed to answer their questions, but authors can self-certify this.

You can read the RR guidelines at EHS here. While we hope these guidelines are useful for explaining the format and typical expectations, one nice feature of RRs at EHS is that the editorial team is very open to suggestions for how to make this format work for diverse types of research. We just want to solve the problem of publication bias, strengthen statistical inference, and make it easier to justify resource-intensive studies by providing guaranteed publication. If the existing guidelines don’t work for that, we are happy to discuss modifications.

For more details, the Center for Open Science is the most comprehensive resource about RRs. You can see a list of the participating journals, resources for editors and funders, and a very helpful list of frequently asked questions. You can also see a list of all the published RRs (185 so far) at this Zotero Library.

In the past few years, I’ve seen a real shift in the community of scholars doing evolutionary work on human behaviour towards enthusiasm for open science practices in general, and registered reports in particular. I’m excited that EHS can be part of that.

We also asked on Twitter, via the EHS account, for researcher’s reasons for submitting registered reports and here are some excerpts of the received answers:

“The main reason we chose to submit register reports is that in this way we can make sure our research results be published no matter what they turn out later. Even though we believe results inconsistent with hypothesis are also evaluable, we also have to admit they are more likely to be rejected by journals. As students and researchers who want to go further, we need to make achievements, which is to say, we eagerly hope to see our research be published.

[…] If you make clear all the procedures of your research in advance, you have no chance to exert personal influence on later analysis of data or interpretation of results.”

Jingwen Yang, Kyushu University, Japan

“I’ve led several registered reports now. I am particularly enthusiastic about them because they are the most straightforward and reliable way of neutralising publication bias. They are also a very concrete way of ensuring you carefully think through the key aspects of the design, analysis pipeline and interpretation.”

Benedict Jones, Glasgow University, UK

“The most advantageous part for students is that some psychology experts (aside from the adviser and senior in your laboratory) can advise on your experimental plan. The people in your laboratory would research subjects almost similar to yours and have a similar mode of thinking even if they have different themes. Certainly, the guidance of people with a lot of experience in a theme is indispensable, but sometimes you can get an unexpected good idea from someone who is not related to this theme […].

Next, compared to the conventional peer review system, the Registered Reports has the advantage that if there is any problem with the experimental method, it can be corrected before the experiment. If more people, including those who are not in your laboratory, can check your experimental plan, the problems with the experiment will decrease. It will allow your study to proceed more smoothly and accurately.”

Huanxu Liu, Kyushu University, Japan