The following blog is based on a recent COS webinar. You can watch the full recording here.
Preregistration is increasingly recognized as a key open science practice that enhances transparency, reduces research bias, and improves reproducibility across disciplines. For many researchers, especially those new to the process, choosing the right preregistration template can seem daunting at first.
This guide offers practical advice to help you navigate the available preregistration template options on the Open Science Framework (OSF) and choose the template that best aligns with your research.
What is Preregistration?
Preregistration is the practice of posting a time-stamped, read-only version of your study plan to a public repository before beginning data collection or analysis. This establishes a transparent record of your research intentions.
Understanding Related Terminology
When discussing research planning documentation, different disciplines use several related terms. While these terms generally refer to the same process of documenting your research design and analysis plan before collecting or analyzing data, understanding their nuances can help you navigate the literature and choose the right approach.
- Registration: The act of submitting a study plan to a public registry. Doing so prospectively indicates it was submitted prior to beginning the study. The term originates in the clinical research field, where prospective is defined as prior to enrolling the first patient in the trial.
- Preregistration: Also written as pre-registration, this is identical to prospective study registration but emphasizes that it was submitted before the study began. Outside of clinical research, pre- or prospective generally refers to the period or stage before beginning data analysis, which includes looking at any summary statistics.
- Pre-analysis plan: This term originated in economics research, and refers to the data analysis that will be used on the data and is created prior to seeing, accessing, or collecting the data. Strictly speaking, the plan does not have to be registered, although best practice includes registering that plan prior to beginning any specific study.
Why Preregister?
Preregistration offers several key benefits:
Increasing Research Visibility: The "file drawer problem" refers to the tendency for studies with null or inconclusive results to go unpublished, leading to a distorted understanding of scientific evidence. This selective reporting skews the research landscape by overrepresenting positive findings. Preregistration helps address this issue by creating a public record of all planned studies, ensuring that research contributions—regardless of outcome—are visible and accessible.
- Reducing Questionable Research Practices: Preregistration minimizes practices such as p-hacking (selectively analyzing or reporting results to achieve statistical significance) and HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known) by requiring key study decisions to be documented in advance. This safeguards research integrity by preventing bias that can arise in post hoc analytic decisions.
- Enhancing Study Design and Planning: The preregistration process encourages researchers to think critically about their hypotheses, methods, and analyses before beginning data collection. This structured approach helps identify potential design flaws early, reduces ambiguities in analysis plans, and contributes to more rigorous and replicable studies.
Mitigating Publication Bias: Journals often prioritize studies with significant or novel findings, making it difficult for null results to be published. Preregistering a study creates a transparent record of all research efforts, allowing evaluations based on methodological rigor rather than outcome-driven significance. This fosters a more balanced and reliable research landscape.
When to Preregister
Preregister as close to the start of data collection as feasible. While you can draft your plans in OSF early and refine them over time, finalizing your registration just before beginning data collection allows maximum flexibility during planning while still establishing your protocol before seeing any data.
For pilot studies aimed at testing methodology rather than producing publishable results, preregistration isn't strictly necessary. However, if you choose to preregister a pilot, clearly label it as such and describe how you'll use the data.
How to Begin a Preregistration on OSF:
There are two main workflows for creating a preregistration on OSF:
- Visit osf.io/registries and click "Add New" to create a standalone registration
- From an existing OSF project, select the "Registrations" tab to freeze your current project at a specific point in time
Both paths will prompt you to select a template that best fits your research.
Popular Templates on OSF
There are 11 different preregistration templates currently available on the OSF, with more in development. Below are the most popular templates.
General Purpose Templates:
- OSF Preregistration: This comprehensive template is excellent for first-time users or those without a discipline-specific template. It guides you through detailed questions about your study design, sample, variables, and analysis plan.
- AsPredicted.org: A more streamlined alternative to the OSF template, this option asks just the essential questions with minimal guidance. For example, where the OSF template may ask detailed questions about your sample size justification, AsPredicted simply asks how many observations will be collected.
Templates for Specific Research Types:
- Generalized Systematic Review: Ideal for systematic reviews, scoping reviews, and meta-analyses, this template focuses on search strategies, database interfaces, inclusion/exclusion criteria, query strings, and validation approaches. It includes helpful examples to guide you in documenting your review methodology.
- Preregistration in Social Psychology: This template is well-suited for quantitative research with human subjects in social psychology and related fields. It emphasizes clearly documenting hypotheses, methods, analysis plans, variables, sample size justification, and participant inclusion/exclusion criteria.
- Qualitative Preregistration: Developed specifically for qualitative research, this template focuses on documenting assumptions, beliefs, and credibility strategies, emphasizing the evolving process of data collection and analysis.
- Preregistration for Studies with Existing Data: When using data that already exists—whether from public databases or previously collected research—this template helps address potential biases by documenting your knowledge of the dataset and any steps taken to mitigate bias in your analyses.
- Replication Recipe (Pre-Study): For direct replications of previous studies, this template guides you through articulating how your study will match the original and pre-specifying criteria for determining whether the replication supports the original findings.
- Registered Report Protocol: Specifically designed for the Registered Reports publishing format, this simple template allows you to upload a manuscript that has received in-principle acceptance from a journal, along with any supporting materials.
- Open-Ended and OSF Standard Pre-Data Collection: These minimal templates provide basic structure for those who prefer to upload their own detailed preregistration documents rather than filling out template-specific questions. However, for searchability and completeness, more structured templates are generally recommended.
Making Changes After Preregistration
If you need to make changes after preregistering, OSF allows you to update your registration with clear documentation of what changed and why. These changes are versioned to maintain a transparent record of your research process.
Choosing the Best Template
If you're still uncertain about which template to use:
- Download templates to explore the questions they include before committing
- For exploratory research, consider more concise templates like AsPredicted
- If no template aligns perfectly with your study, the OSF preregistration or AsPredicted templates offer flexible, widely-used options
- If you have a discipline-specific template that's not available on OSF, you can use the open-ended registration to upload it as a document
Remember that the goal of preregistration is transparency in your research process. Choosing an appropriate template will help you document your plans in a way that's clear, comprehensive, and appropriate for your research methodology.
COS is actively developing new preregistration templates with community input. We are currently accepting template proposals for potential inclusion in the OSF. Learn more and submit a template.
