Registered report adoption in academic journals: assessing rates in different research domains

Abstract

Although the number of journals that have adopted the registered report format has increased rapidly in recent years, they still account for only a tiny portion of academic journals. This article provides a summary and overview of the number and proportion of journals that accept the registered report format in the various scientific domains. The Center for Open Science was searched for journals that have adopted the registered report as a regular submission option. The numbers of such journals in each scientific domain were then counted based on their group and category classification in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). In July 2023, 278 journals had adopted the registered report format, with 186 of these journals included in the JCR. The percentage of journals that had adopted the registered report format ranged from 0 to 7% across the different major research fields (groups in JCR) and from 0 to 34% across the research subfields (categories in JCR). The group “Psychiatry/Psychology” and category “Psychology, Experimental” had the highest percentage of journals that had adopted registered reports. Four large-scale replication projects have been published, focusing on psychology, social science, medicine, and economics, respectively. Although all four studies showed unsatisfactory replication success rates, ≤ 1% of the journals in the corresponding scientific domains had adopted registered reports, with the exception of psychology (7%). To improve research reliability and transparency, it is critical to increase the use of the registered report publishing format.