29.3168, Disc: Adopting Registered Reports for Linguistic Journals

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-3168. Tue Aug 14 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.3168, Disc: Adopting Registered Reports for Linguistic Journals

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Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2018 13:01:45
From: Timo Roettger [timo.b.roettger at gmail.com]
Subject: Adopting Registered Reports for Linguistic Journals

 
Dear fellow linguists,

Many of you have probably heard of a new format for journal articles which has
mainly been discussed within the psychological sciences: “Registered Reports”
(RR). With RRs, you write a study and analysis plan, and submit it to a
journal before you collect the data. You get feedback from the reviewers on
the design of the study. If the reviewers approve of the methods, you get
conditional acceptance. This means that the study will be published regardless
of its outcome. Exploratory analyses can still be reported, but they will be
explicitly distinguished from the confirmatory part of the analysis relating
to the original hypotheses.

The RR format is good for the scientific record, because it combats
publication bias, i.e. the tendency to publish positive results more often
than null results, HARKing, i.e. Hypothesizing After Results are Known, and
p-hacking, i.e. hunting for significant results in order to ultimately report
these results as if confirming the planned analysis

It is also good for us as individual researchers, because it helps us to avoid
situations where we invest time and resources into a study, only to find out
in retrospect that we overlooked some design flaw, yielding the study
unpublishable. 

Many people have recently written about the conceptual and practical
advantages of registered reports. You can find more information and answers to
frequently asked questions about RRs here: https://cos.io/rr/. 

Note that introducing registered reports as an article type does not mean that
regular research pipelines will be substituted. It is complementary.

The Open Science Framework has started to approach journals, asking them to
adopt this new article form. Doing this is a lot of work, so the field relies
on us to spread the word and approach our own journals. I have recently
started this initiative and convinced over 50 scholars from over 40
institutions to join this endeavor.

There are some journals which offer the RR format, but not many of them are
relevant to a specialized audience of quantitative linguistics. Fellow
researchers from reading and hearing research have already started to contact
some journals that are also relevant to us (including journals such as JML and
Cognition). I want to take their work as a departure point and aim at
contacting the editors of our own journals to suggest accepting the RR format.
We have already made a list of over 30 journals that publish linguistic
research (and have not been approached by others).

In order to increase our chances of these journals adopting RRs (alongside the
traditional article formats), I would like to ask you three favors (which
won’t cost you much time): Please visit this google document:
http://bit.ly/lingregrep 

1) If there are any journals where you would like to see RRs, please add them
to the list (sheet ''Journals'') before the 15th of September.

2) If you would like to be a signatory on the emails to the editors, please
let me know or add your name to the list of signatories (sheet
''Signatories''). I will add your name to the emails that I will send to the
editors. Here is a template of the email: 
https://osf.io/3wct2/wiki/Journal%20Requests/

3) If you are part of any networks for which this could be relevant, please
help me to spread the word and my two requests above.

If you have any questions or concerns about RRs, I would be very happy to
discuss these matters with you.

Thank you for your time.
Kind regards,
Timo Roettger



Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
                     Applied Linguistics
                     Clinical Linguistics
                     Cognitive Science
                     Computational Linguistics
                     Discourse Analysis
                     Forensic Linguistics
                     General Linguistics
                     Genetic Classification
                     Language Acquisition
                     Language Documentation
                     Lexicography
                     Morphology
                     Neurolinguistics
                     Philosophy of Language
                     Phonetics
                     Phonology
                     Pragmatics
                     Psycholinguistics
                     Semantics
                     Sociolinguistics
                     Syntax
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics
                     Typology
                     Writing Systems



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