preregRS guides preregistration. Facilitating Open Science Practices for research syntheses

In the process of a research synthesis, researchers are faced with a plethora of decisions that determine the outcome of their synthesis: Choosing between search strategies may result in a difference of several hundred documents, whereas choosing eligibility criteria to include or exclude individual documents directly shapes the data base. Moreover, choosing the data synthesis strategy (like including moderators) change the inferences to be drawn from the paper. Increasingly established open science practices enable researchers to make these decision processes transparent and the research reproducible (Allen & Mehler, 2019). Against the background of the researchers’ degrees of freedom, these practices are just as relevant for research syntheses as they are for original studies (Wilson, 2019). We therefore argue for the open science practice of preregistering research syntheses. However, preregistrations put high demands on researchers as they have to decide on diverse aspects of the prospective research procedure (Nosek et al., 2019). Hence, scientists need guidance in the process of preregistration by drawing their attention to relevant decisions in the research process and limiting uncertainties. In this respect, researchers need both, a clear framework that guides their preregistration of research syntheses according to quality standards and at the same time flexibility to adapt this framework to individual needs of distinct research projects. Yet, there are no such established frameworks available, that can be applied to a wide range of disciplines. In the present paper, we introduce preregRS, a framework that provides a step-by-step guideline to prepare preregistrations, which is flexibly adaptable to the individual needs of the own research synthesis. The framework is implemented in an R Markdown file that can be compiled to HTML or PDF and uploaded to established services to complete the preregistration (e.g. psycharchives.org). In this file, researchers are guided through relevant steps of preregistration (like filling out a form) and assisted with information from established standards scaffolding the process. The R Markdown template preregRS is available as an R package. Upon installation of the package, the file will be available in RStudio as an R Markdown template. You can get a glimpse of the empty template compiled to HTML via http://bit.ly/preregRS-HTML and test the R Markdown template itself using a jupyter notebook via http://bit.ly/preregRS-jupyter (jupyter notebook is a web application which allows to share, inter alia, live code, however, might take longer loading time on first startup). We created the template to support researchers in the detailed planning phase of research syntheses and pursuit of transparency, not to limit their options. As DeHaven put it: preregistration is “a plan, not a prison”. (2017, no page) The present template provides a structure and directory for this plan. In this respect, the present template is the first attempt to explicitly support and guide researchers across all disciplines to plan their systematic reviews and meta-analyses. It marks another step towards transparent and open science, and represents a proposal for preregistration standards with research syntheses to be established.