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Gunnar De Winter Post 1

• 28 October 2019, 10:32 AM

Unknown and unloved?

Personally, I haven't yet preregistered a study. Part of this is, of course, my own fault. 

But I also think that the practice of preregistering is not yet that well-known to early career scientists. In my experience, it doesn't really come up often during PhD training, and even if it does, it tends to take the backseat to what seem - at the time - more urgent concerns.

Most students are 'raised' in the standard academic workflow of design - experiment - write - publish. Preregistering shuffles this around a bit, and I think that makes it seem (keyword: seem) like more work. 

Finally, it is not exactly incentivized a lot, even though API's might change that.  

Emma Harris

Emma Harris Post 2 in reply to 1

• 29 October 2019, 3:59 PM

Very true, raising awareness is one of the biggest challenges, especially when methods challenge the status quo of research.

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Jose Hermes Lopez Prato Post 3 in reply to 1

• 2 November 2019, 10:23 PM • Edited by the author on 2 November 2019, 10:35 PM

It is a challenge to change our minds to this really open and collaborative way of doing science. As I see so far, this means to make public the early stage of your work and then, once you have the data and the related analysis, report the final stage, being this last one, a report of the methodology's accuracy, previously described and peer reviewed (so, these are not only yours!). I like this because your strategy becomes a shared and agreed one and offer to you good chances of going more far and be supported for the community in advance, as you 'roll down the road'.

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Beatrice Gini Post 4 in reply to 1

• 4 November 2019, 8:57 AM

That's a really good point about raising awareness among early career scientists. As someone who works mostly on researcher training I have a conundrum: on the one hand we try to make early career scientists aware of this and other good practices, on the other they come back and tell us 'my PI won't let me'. This objection has also arisen elsewhere in this forum. I wonder what the best strategy for increasing uptake is...

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Hope Amos Post 5 in reply to 1

• 5 November 2019, 11:18 AM

In the PhD courses at my university we are encouraged to submit detailed research plans periodically, including hypothesis and methods. I had not heard of preregistration before taking this course, but it seems like something postgraduates are being encouraged to think about here, even if it isn't being labelled as such.