Published: Apr 14, 2025

One of the recent research trends is pre-registration. More and more researchers are pre-registering their studies. Pre-registration means documenting your research plan — including your hypotheses, methods, and analysis strategies — before you collect or analyze your data. This record is then time-stamped and stored (often publicly) in a registry. It doesn’t prevent you from being curious, exploratory, or adjusting plans as needed. It just makes sure readers know what was planned in advance versus discovered along the way.

The benefits of pre-registration include:

• Enhances Credibility: Stakeholders, funders, and journal reviewers see that your study wasn’t driven by hindsight or selective reporting.
• Distinguishes Exploratory from Confirmatory Findings: Clear pre-registration helps you show which findings were predicted (confirmatory) and which were unexpected but interesting (exploratory).
• Protects Against Biases: Helps avoid practices like p-hacking (running many analyses until something is “significant”) or HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known).
• Strengthens Replicability: Clear study plans make it easier for others to replicate or build on your work.

To pre-register your study, it is necessary to first design your study, including defining your research questions or hypotheses, outlining your study design (e.g., survey, experimental, case study), choose your data sources (e.g., users, library systems, archives), and planing your analysis methods (e.g., statistical tests, coding schemes, text mining approaches).

Then, choose a pre-registration platform. Popular platforms include:

• Open Science Framework (OSF) – widely used, flexible for different kinds of studies.
• AsPredicted.org – quick and user-friendly for straightforward projects.

Some platforms offer structured formats, or you can create your own document when submitting your pre-registration. Once uploaded, your pre-registration gets a timestamp. You can choose to keep it private until you publish your work or make it public immediately. If you later need to deviate from your plan (very normal!), you can simply document the changes.

It is important to note that pre-registration is just a record. You can still submit your final paper anywhere you choose. Research is dynamic and you can still explore. You just clarify which parts were planned vs. discovered. More and more journals (especially open access ones) are recognizing and valuing pre-registered studies.

In LIS research, where study designs can vary widely, from user experience surveys to bibliometric analyses to digital archiving experiments. Pre-registration could offer a simple but powerful way to boost your research integrity, visibility, and impact.