Pre-registering research methodology guarantees the transparency of the research and allows the results to be verified.
Pre-registration consists of a detailed description of the experimental plan before the experiment is conducted.
It involves the inclusion in a public register of the methods relating to the research, such as: purposes, measured variables, statistical methods and exclusion criteria.
The advantages of pre-registration are many:
- transparency: the detailed description of the project allows other researchers to fully understand how the experiment was conducted
- reproducibility: data made public allows other scientists to reproduce processes
- integrity: researchers tend to observe an objective attitude in carrying out scientific research, being less inclined to manipulate data. This approach helps maintain the integrity of scientific research and reduces the risk of bias reporting, i.e. the tendency to select the results that emerge in a more or less conscious manner
You can archive your pre-registration on OSF: https://osf.io/registries