Can One Publishing Format Solve the Replication Crisis?

In academic spaces, concern over low rates of research replicability has been on the rise. Academia has consistently favored a high quantity of publications, and statistically significant results within those publications, but Moin Syed, faculty, contends that this traditional structure of incentivization has unfortunately diminished the integrity of those results when researchers feel pressured to inflate evidentiary strength.

In a recent editorial entitled “Registered Reports in Animal Biology: A New Format,” Syed, along with Willem Frankenhuis of the University of Amsterdam, advocated for a new publication format for research articles that was created to mitigate the aforementioned issue. The format, named Registered Reports, involves undergoing peer review before publishing the results of a study, as opposed to after. This shift will hopefully reduce the perceived need for results to be statistically significant because peer review will be based solely on the strength of the methodology rather than results.

A major contributing issue to what Syed referred to as the “replication crisis” is publication bias, or the fact that the published literature does not adequately reflect the research that has actually been conducted. Most journals select articles based on statistically significant results, which leads some researchers to engage in practices such as altering their analyses and/or hypotheses in the later stages of their work depending on the emerging outcomes. While earlier peer review can help quell such behavior, the Registered Reports format was specifically designed to further mitigate the problem by requiring researchers to preregister research plans that they cannot drastically diverge from without explanation.

According to Syed, the Registered Reports format seems to be working thus far in terms of increasing research quality. Syed believes it provides additional benefits for the construction of studies because reviewers are able to make suggestions and recommendations about the research before it has been conducted, thus allowing the researcher(s) to alter their plan for the better. Syed’s early appraisal of Registered Reports is that it appears to be an effective and less stressful alternative to more traditional research publication formats.

This article was published open access by the Animal Biology journal.