  Preregistration entails researchers registering their planned research
hypotheses, methods, and analyses in a time-stamped document before they
undertake their data collection and analyses. This document is then made
available with the published research report to allow readers to identify
discrepancies between what the researchers originally planned to do and what
they actually ended up doing. This historical transparency is supposed to
facilitate judgments about the credibility of the research findings. The
present article provides a critical review of 17 of the reasons behind this
argument. The article covers issues such as HARKing, multiple testing,
p-hacking, forking paths, optional stopping, researchers' biases, selective
reporting, test severity, publication bias, and replication rates. It is
concluded that preregistration's historical transparency does not facilitate
judgments about the credibility of research findings when researchers provide
contemporary transparency in the form of (a) clear rationales for current
hypotheses and analytical approaches, (b) public access to research data,
materials, and code, and (c) demonstrations of the robustness of research
conclusions to alternative interpretations and analytical approaches.
