Our next meeting will be on November 20, 2019 at 4PM, featuring a talk by Timo Roettger, a postdoctoral fellow in the Linguistics department. Abstract & title below. As usual, a happy hour will follow at Stacked & Folded Evaston (824 Noyes).

Preregistration – What is it? Why should we do it? And what’s in it for us?
The current publication system incentivizes neither publishing null results nor direct replication attempts. This state of affairs biases the scientific record toward novel findings that appear to support presented hypotheses (referred to as “publication bias”). Moreover, flexibility in data collection, measurement, and analysis (referred to as “researcher degrees of freedom”) can lead to overconfident beliefs in the robustness of a statistical relationship. This flexibility is particularly pronounced in speech sciences, potentially increasing the rate of false discoveries in our own publication record.
One strategy to systematically decrease publication bias and the harmful impact of researcher degrees of freedom is preregistration. A preregistration is a time-stamped document that specifies how data is to be collected, measured, and analyzed prior to data collection. Preregistration is a powerful tool to reduce bias and to facilitate transparency in decision making. This talk introduces the concept of preregistration and discusses its benefits and potential disadvantages for both our scientific field and individual researchers.

November 20, 2019, 4PM to 5PM
Cresap 101, Cresap Laboratory 2029 Sheridan Rd