[_aavaa_]

Pre-registration is a pretty big one: essential you outline your research plan (what you’re looking for, how you will analyze the data, what bars you are setting for significance, etc.) before you do any research. You plan is reviewed and accepted (or denied), often by both funding agency and journal you want to submit to, before they know the results.

Then you perform the experiment exactly* how you said you would based on the pre-registration, and you get to publish your results whether they are positive or negative.

* Changes are allowed, but must be explicitly called out and a valid reason given.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preregistration_(science)

[isthatafact]

A huge benefit of that is that it would force the publication of null results, although there would still be no incentive for others to cite null result publications, and citations are unfortunately the main metric that determines the "value" of a scientist. Is there a way to make null result publications valuable?

Also, forcing pre-registration on everyone would be problematic because some types of research are not well-suited to strict planning and committee approval -- how would you quickly make adjustments to an experiment? how would you do exploratory data analysis? serendipitous discoveries would be suppressed? etc.

[_aavaa_]

You can still do exploratory data analysis, you just have to say that’s what you’re doing ahead of time.

This way, when you find one significant correlation after testing ten thousand options, you have to say you tried all ten thousand, rather than make it sounds like you only tested the one.

[poincaredisk]

Wow, I didn't think it's possible, but it sounds like a great way to make research boring :).

[_aavaa_]

What is boring about this? You get the guarantee of publishing your work, even if you get a negative result.

I take it you don’t do research. Cause boring is nothing compared to wasting month of time and money only to get a negative result that nobody will publish.

[poincaredisk]

I'm not in the academy, but I do R&D, I published several times, and that's not how I work at all.

I have a broad and open-ended focus, I work as usual on the things I find interesting, then sometimes I see a thing that looks interesting and decide to investigate, then sometimes my initial tests give good results, but more often then they don't, but they give me an idea to do something completely different, and some iterations later I have a result.

I imagine that depends on a field of research. IT is cheap, but I imagine a physicist who wants to do an experiment must secure a funding first, because otherwise it's impossible to do anything. And it requires one to commit to a single topic of research.

[_aavaa_]

> but more often then they don't

That part is true in all fields. And one of the things that pre-registration enables is the publishing of those negative results.

Otherwise, once you're done the research and got the negative result nobody wants to publish it (unless it’s very flashy). Without being able to publish negative results, and therefore read about them, each researcher must conduct an experiment already known, if only in private, to not work.

[Scarblac]

So he has to take time to write up those experiments he was doing as exploration, and nobody will read them because who wants to spend time reading about failed experiments.

People will still want to do their own exploring to get a feel for a problem.

[_aavaa_]

> who wants to spend time reading about a failed experiment.

A negative result is *not* a failed experiment. Mapping out the negative space is very valuable if the hypotheses being tested are worthwhile ones.

[neilv]

From the perspective of a dishonest researcher, what are the compliance barriers to secretly doing the research work, and only after that doing the pre-registration?

[akshitgaur2005]

You would need the funding anyway before you could start the research

[smokel]

One could implement some pipelining to avoid that problem.

[_aavaa_]

A lack of money.

And really if you want to be dishonest it’s easier to manipulate the raw data then it is to secretly perform the experiments ahead of time.