The preregistration revolution needs to distinguish between predictions and analyses

Abstract

Nosek et al. (1) recently joined others in advocating for “widespread adoption of preregistration” as a tool for advancing science. The language they use in making this important argument, however, creates unnecessary confusion: Like many others discussing these issues, they seem to conflate the goal of theory falsification with the goal of constraining type I error. This masks a crucial distinction between two types of preregistration: preregistering a theoretical, a priori, directional prediction (which serves to clarify how a hypothesis is constructed) and preregistering an analysis plan (which serves to clarify how evidence is produced). Indeed, philosophers of science have identified elements of both how a hypothesis is constructed and how evidence is … [↵][1]1Email: aledgerwood{at}ucdavis.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 36 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.