Talk:Preregistration (science)

Based on my understanding of the two topics, this seem appropriate. But I'm not an expert, so would welcome more input here. Scientific29 (talk) 15:07, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Scientific29: These are the same topics. Clinical trial registration is a type of pre-registration. I advocate for separation and I will give some reasons.

First, I hardly have numbers, but health care is about 20% of global GDP and about half of all scientists are in human health research. Because of this clinical trial registration is an outsized part of preregistration.

Second, clinical trial registration has its own well developed culture. Non-scientists engage in this by community participation in medical research, such as by discussing trial participation, seeking out trials, trying to understand results, and monitoring research. It is not that semi-organized volunteer research itself has a major direct science impact, but cultural products do greatly influence the practice of clinical research. Psychology studies are also human subject research, and there is also a preregistration drive for them, but they are not so routinely a matter of personal health like medical studies. For other kinds of science which has less public interaction culture, there is a lack of pressure to pre-register and be open.

Third, there is already major technological infrastructure for pre-registering clinical trials. ClinicalTrials.gov is most prominent but there are other databases tied to government. Machine readability is the future of pre-registration, but since the infrastructure mostly exists for clinical trials, meta-research on the trials themselves happens most often in clinical research and conversations about pre-registration tend to use medical research as examples.

Because we have all this source material leaning to medicine being able to stand alone, I think keeping the articles split works. Notice that from source material, most of what is cited here is medicine in that medical article, psychology in the preregistration article, and very little representation from any other field of research. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:32, 13 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to add my vote for not merging these two articles. Precisely because "Clinical trial registration is a type of pre-registration" but not all pre-registration studies need be clinical trials (testing a certain medical intervention), nor indeed in the field of health. One could preregister a scientific study on how to observe patterns in the natural world or political science, for example. Just as all apples are fruit, but not all fruit are applies; it's important we keep the concepts distinct even if one is a subset of the other (and even if we should make clearer the relationship to/links between the articles i.e. cite clinical trial registration as an example of scientific preregistration). Sb101FV (talk) 17:17, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Klbrain: You recently performed a merge of "Preregistration" into "Clinical trial registration" saying "following unopposed 2019 proposal; synonyms". Is this an error, or do you have more to say? It seems like there are two people here talking through no merge, and one person suggesting it. Do you have an opinion on this, or were you just going through a list of merge discussions and attempted to close this one? Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:01, 19 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry about; missed the discussion (much have checked the other talk page only). I've reverted and will consider this a little more. Klbrain (talk) 16:35, 19 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

On balance, I support the merge, primarily because the page with the broadest title (Preregistration) is too narrow in content (discussing only Psychology, with a little on Neuroscience) and poorly developed. For example, other than one sentence in the lede, the only other referenced content consists of statements of support from journals. The justification and description contained in Clinical trial registration apply equally to the broader topic, and hence I support a merge on the grounds of overlap, short text and context. The topic is currently too briefly discussed an undeveloped for content to be split over two articles. Klbrain (talk) 17:04, 19 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Klbrain: I agree with your assessment that the "preregistration" article is underdeveloped and that it is narrow. I do not oppose it being merged somewhere, but psychology and neuroscience registration does not seem to me a good fit for merging into clinical trials research. Other options include

• Replication crisis <--15k hits/month, probably top level fit
• Reproducibility <-- 6k hits / month
• Clinical trial registration <- 800 hits/month

or the opposite, which is merging clinical trial registration into preregistration

If this preregistration article were expanded then it could be better linked with those articles. Registration has different motivations in various fields. For medicine the primary motivation is legal compliance. For psychology it is more activist and a wish to do better. The reproducibility Project is a big driver of pre-registration in psychology and led to the publication of this paper, not cited in this article

• Nosek, Brian A.; Ebersole, Charles R.; DeHaven, Alexander C.; Mellor, David T. (13 March 2018). "The preregistration revolution". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. pp. 2600–2606. doi:10.1073/pnas.1708274114. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |url= (help)

I feel like there are lots of ways we could compromise to resolve this quickly without much more discussion, but I would like another round of your thoughts about any of this. Can you say again what you think is best? I could even change my mind about the merge which you already proposed. Blue Rasberry (talk) 00:00, 20 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Bluerasberry: thanks for your very thorough analysis of the options. Merging Preregistration to Replication crisis might work, under the Addressing the replication crisis section; perhaps adding a hatnote in that section linking to Clinical trial registration. However, Replication crisis is already quite long (almost 80k), so there isn't much room there for development and this is likely to be an expanding field over the next few years. That's why on balance I'm more in favor of merging clinical trial registration into the broader topic (preregistration), keeping Clinical trial registration as the major section in that article. The expanded article could then be linked more appropriately, as you suggest, with pages like Replication crisis. However, either of these options would be reasonable. Klbrain (talk) 07:38, 20 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Klbrain:, merging clinical trial registration into Preregistration is a good idea (given the former is a subset of the latter). NB: Important to be clear that clinical trial registration is one specific example (an application of preregistration in the health field), and that preregistration can be used in any scientific field broadly. For example, psychology has been a major focus of the Reproducibility Project; though not exclusive to it (e.g. political science/LaCour study non-reproducability). Such content could help develop the general preregistration article. As can @Bluerasberry:'s point: that there can be different motivations in various fields (e.g. medicine/legal vs psychology/confidence in findings).

Replication crisis already links to Preregistration, and I've just added a link vice versa in the intro. I think this makes sense as preregistration is just one example of proposals and attempts to deal with the replication crises e.g. preregistration (standards of study design), better supply and standards of peer reviewers (to catch errors in the initial study), increase in replication studies (to reproduce or dispute finding), decoupling publication and technical assessment (so that you can do one assessment, then shop your study to journals without each journal doing their own assessment). NB: I'm not saying all of these do/should have their own article (a footnote reference may suffice for some). But I think there's enough content for preregistration that a linked article works. Sb101FV (talk) 13:40, 30 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]