The registration continuum in clinical science: A guide toward transparent practices

Abstract

Clinical scientists can use a continuum of registration efforts that vary in their disclosure and timing relative to data collection and analysis. Broadly speaking, registration benefits investigators by offering stronger, more powerful tests of theory with particular methods in tandem with better control of long-run false positive error rates. Registration helps clinical researchers in thinking through tensions between bandwidth and fidelity that surround recruiting participants, defining clinical phenotypes, handling comorbidity, treating missing data, and analyzing rich and complex data. In particular, registration helps record and justify the reasons behind specific study design decisions, though it also provides the opportunity to register entire decision trees with specific endpoints. Creating ever more faithful registrations and standard operating procedures may offer alternative methods of judging a clinical investigator's scientific skill and eminence because study registration increases the transparency of clinical researchers' work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Figure 1.

Locations of example registrations in the time-disclosure continuum. Preregistrations occur before data are collected, coregistrations after data collection starts but before data analysis begins, and postregistrations after data analysis has begun. Describing more features of a study’s design in a registration would earn it a higher score on the disclosure axis.