What is pre-registration in research?

• A. The practice of making all aspects of your research publicly available before data collection begins.
• B. A method of preregistering data analysis plans after data collection begins.
• C. A standard for preregistering results in a manuscript.
• D. A method of randomizing participants.

Answer: (A)

Pre-registration is the act of publicly documenting your study plan before you collect any data. This includes what you intend to investigate, how you will collect data, which outcomes you will measure, and exactly how you will analyze the data. By sharing this plan ahead of time, researchers commit to their methods and analysis in advance, which helps prevent changing hypotheses or analyses after seeing the results (p-hacking or HARKing) and enhances transparency and credibility. This describes making all aspects of the plan publicly available before data collection begins. The other options describe after-the-fact plans, focus on results, or unrelated methods, which do not capture preregistration.