Preregistration and registered reports are two promising open science practices for increasing transparency in the scientific process. In particular, they create transparency around one of the most consequential distinctions in research design: the data analytics decisions made before data collection and post-hoc decisions made afterwards. Preregistration involves publishing a time-stamped record of a study design before data collection or analysis. Registered reports are a publishing approach that facilitates the evaluation of research without regard for the direction or magnitude of findings. In this paper, I evaluate opportunities and challenges for these open science methods, offer initial guidelines for their use, explore relevant tensions around new practices, and illustrate examples from educational psychology and social science. This paper was accepted for publication in Educational Psychologist volume 56, issue 2; scheduled for April 2021, as a part of a special issue titled, “Educational psychology in the open science era.”This preprint has been peer reviewed, but not copy edited by the journal and may differ from the final published version. The DOI of the final published version is: [insert preprint DOI number]. Once the article is published online, it will be available at the following permanent link: [insert doi link]
Introduction to the special issue on social data analytics in medicine and healthcare