Project SherlockEst. Knowledge

Paper

2018

The Preregistration Revolution

Brian A. Nosek, Charles R. Ebersole, Alexander C. DeHaven & David T. Mellor

Argues that registering hypotheses and analysis plans before seeing the data is the single change most able to separate confirmatory testing from exploratory data analysis, and that failing to distinguish the two is what let so many false positives into the published literature.

Before you start

FreeIntermediatelink checked 17 Sept 2026

Read these first

Not a difficulty warning — a route. These are in the library too.

False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as SignificantJoseph P. Simmons, Leif D. Nelson & Uri Simonsohn, 2011Ordinary, undisclosed researcher choices - when to stop collecting data, which conditions to drop, which covariates to control for - let a false hypothesis reach statistical significance far more often than the nominal 5% rate, demonstrated by using them to 'prove' an impossible effect.

Filed under Research Methods & the Replication Crisis in Psychology.