IKG Blog

Preregistrations are time-stamped records of a research study’s hypotheses, methods, and analysis plans that were (with few exceptions) created before data collection has started. They thus help improve research transparency and credibility and reduce the risk of bias, p-hacking, and hindsight interpretation. Additionally, preregistrations have been argued to enhance reproducibility and trustworthiness of scientific findings. However, only preregistrations that fully include essential information of the planned study (i.e., the hypothesized pattern of results, the measures, planned sample size, exclusion criteria, planned analyses to test the hypotheses, and a time stamp) arguably represent a high-quality preregistration.

A research project coded 146 preregistrations mentioned in psychology publications from 2020 with first authors from universities and institutions in German-speaking countries concerning their completeness regarding the six criteria named above. This project was led by Lena Hahn from Trier University and the Leibniz Institute of Psychology and included Jens Hellmann from the IKG as one of the co-authors.

Results, recently published as an open access paper named "A Cross-Sectional Study of the Completeness of Preregistrations by Psychological Authors From German-Speaking Institutions" in the relatively new journal Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, indicate that almost half of the studied preregistrations did not include all of these procedural criteria.

To the open access paper.

The reference to the publication is as follows:

Hahn, L., Glöckner, A., Gollwitzer, M., Hellmann, J., Lange, J., Schindler, S., & Sassenberg, K. (2025). A cross-sectional study of the completeness of preregistrations by psychological authors from German-speaking institutions. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 8(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459251357568