An Excess of Positive Results: Comparing the Standard Psychology Literature With Registered Reports

Selectively publishing results that support the tested hypotheses ("positive" results) distorts the available evidence for scientific claims. In Registered Reports, peer review and the decision to publish take place before results are known. The authors compared the results in published Registered Reports (N = 71 as of November 2018) with a random sample of hypothesis-testing studies from the standard literature (N = 152) in psychology. Analysing the first hypothesis of each article, they found 96% positive results in standard reports but only 44% in Registered Reports, and suggest a plausible factor is the reduction of publication bias and/or Type I error inflation in the Registered Report literature.