Pre-registration & Earth Science?

I'm VERY interested in this, having followed the evolution of pre-registrations in areas of psychology. Indeed, Earth Science would definitely benefit from this sort of approach, at least partly to stop the equivalent of p-hacking (https://bitesizebio.com/31497/guilty-p-hacking/). We've all done it, to some extent...

If you'd like to modify an existing template, make a copy of this one and change it to be more relevant to Earth sciences: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DaNmJEtBy04bq1l5OxS4JAscdZEkUGATURWwnBKLYxk/edit?pli=1 You can then post it on an OSF project (like this one https://osf.io/x4gzt/) and try out some studies using it to see what works or how to improve it. If there is interest it could be a standard option on the OSF registry. (Other templates that you could consider modifying are listed here: https://osf.io/zab38/wiki/home/).

Here https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01831/full an interesting reading about pre-registration.

Thanks, @Domenico Chiarella! This is very interesting, and it has got me wondering how this might relate to the types of stuff we do in geosciences. For example, I guess you could pre-register a hypotheses and set of tests for, for example, structural controls on sedimentation in a rift? Or for some petrological and geochemical analysis of rocks thought to record a specific geological event/condition?

Yes, and I think for experimental geochemists this certainly works. We do experiments in the lab to explicitly test certain hypotheses.

@Christopher Jackson, I though to it as well but dont have a clear answer yet. There are definetely area/questions where it is possible to pre-register an hypotheses - especially if we want to test a specific idea like in the two examples you mentioned - but sometimes we start to work in an area with no clear in mind where we will end. Just as example, I remember when strated my PhD project, my supervisor sent me to an area with as main info the stratigraphic interval to focus on and nothign else. Obviously, this example doesn't represent the normality but for sure after we start to study an area we can come out with much more (and different?) information respect what we had originally in mind. Does this means that pre-registration works for some type of project and not for everyone? Is my view too limited and I am not seeing the full spectrum of pre-registration use and value? For sure, I think the use of pre-registration is (still?) not so common in geoscience, and probably it could be interesting to investigate more.

Thanks all for the interesting conversation. Other fields have approached pre-registration to deal with p-hacking--I'm not sure what/if there's an equivalent problem in earth sciences. Another aspect of pre-registration is the time stamp and I think for many, a preprint itself is enough of a time stamp. There could be value in registering hypotheses in order to make the distinction between confirmatory & exploratory work as in @Domenico Chiarella 's example, or to empower folks to publish the equivalent of "null" results if they're beholden to registered hypotheses. Anyway, I'd be happy to revisit this when the dust settles after the announcement!

I have never come across a pre-registered study in Earth Science. (I am in geophysics, mostly earthquake research). Among my own papers, I can think of one that could have been suitable for pre-registration; it involved a "blind" statistical analysis of data with very low signal-to-noise ratio. In my community, a more common practice that addresses some issues targeted by pre-registration is cross-validation: test a model on data that was left out during the model construction. It's even more systematically done now that Machine Learning is booming (training dataset vs testing dataset).

Ditto. I am struggling a little to see how it might work with some of the stuff we do...although I am aware that there has been times when we've found, by chance, something interest, rather than posing a specific, testable hypothesis. This is what @Domenico Chiarella is thinking about. Those chance encounters with something cool! My career has been about that...:-)