Do Registered Reports Make Scientific Findings More Believable to the Public?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Registered reports are an important initiative to improve the methodological rigor and transparency of scientific studies. One possible benefit of registered reports is that they may increase public acceptance of controversial research findings. We test this question by providing participants in a large US-based sample (n = 1,500) with descriptions of the key features of registered reports and the standard peer-review process, and then eliciting credibility judgments for various scientific results. We do not find evidence that participants view findings from registered reports as more credible than findings conducted under a standard (non-registered) report. This was true for both plausible and implausible study findings. Our results help clarify public attitudes and beliefs about scientific findings in light of recent methodological developments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Metaresearch Domain: Reproducibility · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
| gpt | Metaresearch Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Other design | low |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it