Preregistration: bringing honesty back into science

Scientists have been complaining about it for ages. The pressure to perform, and more importantly, to publish is sky-high in the scientific world. Just try to get your research published when your results are not all that spectacular and you’ll know what they mean. This mentality, of just publishing successes, forces scientist into forging data and results.

The Volkskrant had a conversation with Chris Chambers, a neuropsychologist from the University of Cardiff, who has recently caused commotion with a manifest he put together. He is aiming to make science more honest, by introducing the concept of preregistration to fields other than just the medical sciences. His manifest was signed by 80 leading scientists from fields ranging from psychology to genetics. Preregistration seems like it might be coming a reality thanks to Chamber’s and his peers efforts.

The idea is pretty simple, and has already been applied in different shapes and forms in the medical field. Preregistration means that researchers have to able to put down in words what they want to look into, how they plan on doing that and which conclusions will follow on which results. Chambers, however, doesn’t want to stop there.

His proposal entails that researchers send in their research-proposals to magazines that will then have them judged through means of peer review. Once approved these magazines will then agree to publish the papers regardless of the results. They will be bound to do so through special contracts, meaning that researchers no longer feel the pressure to ‘create’ the best results.

This way research that doesn’t yield any spectacular results will no longer just be swept under the rug, making fraud less attractive. Lets be honest: it’s much more realistic to have research that yields uninteresting results, or conclusions that aren’t all that new. And when getting results isn’t the only goal anymore, We’ll get back to an honest way of researching, hopefully.