Meeting summary
The meeting focused on planning and updates for an upcoming learning community session, including discussions about coding, analysis workflows, and the resources page. The group explored pre-registration practices across different disciplines, covering challenges like working with sensitive data and the debate about public availability, while also discussing registered reports and their benefits for research transparency and credibility. The session concluded with plans for future meetings focused on open data sharing management and FAIR principles, along with an invitation for participants to present.
The meeting focused on updates and planning for an upcoming learning community session. Vahid provided an overview of the current quarter's challenges and mentioned the upcoming topics for November, including Open Data Sharing and Management. Kimberly discussed her interest in learning more about coding and analysis workflows, while Vahid shared his experience teaching related courses. The group discussed the resources page, which Kimberly had contributed to, and Vahid mentioned he would upload the slides and Zoom recording from the meeting to the page. The session concluded with a brief discussion about preparing a resource page and hub for the university.
The group discussed pre-registration practices across different disciplines, with Kimberly explaining its origins in psychology and clinical trials research. Participants shared their varying levels of experience with pre-registration, from complete newcomers to those who have used it in criminology and psychology studies. The discussion covered challenges like working with sensitive data, deviations from pre-registration plans, and the debate about whether to make pre-registrations publicly available. Kimberly emphasized that pre-registration is not meant to restrict research but to document plans, and explained that it can be applied to various research methods including meta-analyses, systematic reviews, and even qualitative research. The group explored how pre-registration could be useful in disciplines like chemistry for teaching research processes to students.
Corin and Kimberly discussed the challenges of reusing text across studies and the importance of pre-registration in research. Kimberly highlighted issues with researcher degrees of freedom and the lack of adequate methods and statistics training in graduate curricula. They talked about the problems of p-hacking, hypothesizing after results, and cherry-picking data, emphasizing the need for transparency and proper reporting in research. Kimberly also shared her experience with a journal editor who was more open to publishing inconsistent results, but faced rejection from an action editor.
The group discussed pre-registration practices, with Kimberly explaining she created her own pre-registration document because existing templates weren't detailed enough for her needs. She emphasized the importance of including specific details about analysis methods and criteria, noting that vague pre-registrations don't prevent p-hacking. The discussion touched on the Center for Open Science's resources, including templates for various disciplines, and Kimberly advised others to use existing templates from OSF rather than creating their own to avoid missing important information.