Publishing Registered Reports in Management and Applied Psychology: Common Beliefs and Best Practices

Abstract

Management and applied psychology scholars are confronted with a crisis undermining trust in their findings. One solution to this crisis is the publication format Registered Reports (RRs). Here, authors submit the frontend of their paper for peer review before data collection. While this format can help increase the trustworthiness of research, authors’ usage of RRs—although emerging—has been scarce and scattered. Eventually, common beliefs regarding the (dis)advantages of RRs and a lack of best practices can limit the broad implementation of this approach. To address these issues, we utilized a systematic review process to identify 50 RRs in management and applied psychology and surveyed authors with (N = 86) and without experience (N = 161) in publishing RRs and reviewers/editors who have handled RRs (N = 59). On this basis, we (a) scrutinize prevalent beliefs surrounding the RR format in the fields of management and applied psychology and (b) derive hands-on best practices. In sum, we provide a fact check and guidelines for authors interested in writing RRs, which can also be used by reviewers to evaluate such submissions.