Registered reports in psychology across scholarly citations and public dissemination A comparative metaevaluation of more than a decade of practice

摘要

After more than a decade of practice, registered reports (RRs) are widely adopted in psychology. However, the acceptance of RRs in terms of postpublication academic recognition and public dissemination, compared with nonregistered reports (non-RR), remained largely unexplored. This matched meta-evaluation identified and analyzed 119 pairs of original research articles (RR vs. non-RR) from 33 psychology journals, matched for the journal of publication, time of publication, and research topic. The exploratory results show that RRs significantly reduced publication bias against null results and improved method and data transparency. However, RRs had lower citation counts than non-RRs, with a small effect size when controlling for days since publication. Additional exploratory analyses found that this effect remained significant after controlling for null-result reporting, transparency, the number of studies in an article and length of method and result sections, article title perception, open access, and authorship metrics (including the number of authors, the h-index of the first or corresponding authors). The overall public impact indexed by Altmetric attention scores and the number of Twitter posts were not significantly different between RRs and non-RRs. However, Twitter posts, but not citations and Altmetric attention scores, were moderated by journal reputation, with RRs receiving more attention in lower impact journals (5-year impact factor below 4.5). These exploratory findings help generate testable hypotheses about the potential differential effects of RRs on academic recognition and public attention, informing future directions for open science practice.