A senior colleague once joked: “If
I read about a new result, my reaction is either: ‘That’s trivial!’, or ‘I
don’t believe that!’”
These types of reactions are pretty
common when presenting the results of a new study (in my experience, anyway).
In peer review, especially the former can be a reason for a paper rejection. In
conversations with colleagues, one sometimes gets told, jokingly: “Well, I could
have told you in advance that you’d get this result, you didn’t have to run the
study!” This can be quite discouraging, especially if, while you were planning
your study, it did not seem at all obvious to you that you would get the obtained
result.
In many cases, perhaps, the
outcomes of a result are obvious,
especially to someone who has been in the field for much longer than you are. For
some effects, there might be huge file drawers, such that it’s a well-known
secret that an experimental paradigm which seems perfectly reasonable at first
sight doesn’t actually work. In this case, it would be very helpful to hear
that it’s probably not the best idea to invest time and resources on this
paradigm. However, it would be even more helpful to hear about this before you plan and execute your study.
One also needs to take into account
that there is hindsight bias. If you hear the results first, it’s easy to come
up with an explanation for the exact obtained pattern. Thus, a some result that
might seem trivial in hindsight would actually have been not so east to predict a priori. There is also often
disagreement about the triviality of an outcome: It's not unheard of (not only in my experience) that Reviewer
1 claims that the paper shouldn't be published because the result is trivial, while Reviewer 2 recommends rejection because (s)he doesn’t believe this
result.
Registered reports should strongly
reduce the amount of times that people tell you that your results are trivial.
If you submit a plan to do an experiment that really is trivial, the reviewers
should point this out while evaluating the Stage 1 manuscript. If they have a
good point, this will save you from collecting data for a study that many
people might not find interesting. And if the reviewers agree that the research
question is novel and interesting, they cannot later do a backflip and say that
it’s trivial after having seen the results.
So, this is another advantage of
registered reports. And, if I’m brave enough, I’ll change the way I tell
(senior) colleagues about my work in informal conversations, from: “I did experiment X,
and I got result Y” to “I did experiment X. What do you think happened?”
