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Preregistering one’s hypotheses, study design, materials, and analytical pipelines aim at preventing questionable research practices by reducing researchers’ degrees of freedom and increasing transparency. Yet, the extent to which preregistrations actually achieve these goals depends on the quality of a preregistration. To scrutinize the quality of current preregistrations, we coded all preregistrations mentioned in journal articles published by psychologists from institutions in German-speaking countries in 2020 as to whether they contain six procedural elements: (1) a timestamp, (2) the hypothesized pattern of results, (3) the primary variables, (4) planned analyses to test the hypothesis, (5) sample size considerations, and (6) exclusion criteria and additional transparency related elements. Our results show that the quality of preregistrations was not associated with the journal’s reputation—neither the Journal Impact Factor nor the Transparency and Openness Factor. Only half of the preregistrations contained all six procedural elements. Hence, in line with previous research, our findings indicate that when considering publications from 2020 and all fields of psychology there was room for improvement regarding both the consequent usage as well as the quality of preregistrations in psychology. Steps to bring preregistration beyond the level of box-ticking are discussed.
Hahn et al. (Tue,) studied this question.