Preregistration, Replication, and Nonexperimental Studies

Abstract

In last month’s column, I worried about whether encouraging us to preregister our hypotheses and analysis plan before running studies would stifle discovery. I came to the conclusion that it needn’t — but that we need to guard against letting the practice run away with itself. In this column, I take up a second concern about preregistration: That it seems to apply only to certain types of studies, and thus runs the risk of marginalizing studies for which preregistration is less fitting.