Publishing Registered Reports in Management and Applied Psychology: Myths, Truths, and Best Practices

Over the last decade, management and applied psychology scholars have been confronted with a crisis that has undermined trust in their findings. One potential solution to this crisis is the publication format of Registered Reports (RRs). Here, authors submit the frontend of their paper for peer-review before data collection. While this format can help increase the trustworthiness of management and applied psychology research, authors’ usage of RRs—although emerging—has been scarce and scattered. In particular, (mis)conceptions regarding the potential disadvantages of RRs and a lack of best practices are limiting the broad implementation of this approach. The present research addresses these issues and provides an overview of successful RRs in the fields of management and applied psychology. We identified 54 RRs through a systematic review process that we utilized to survey 86 authors with experience in writing RRs to (a) scrutinize prevalent myths surrounding the RR format in the fields of management and applied psychology and (b) derive hands-on best practices. Thus, we provide a fact check and guidelines for authors interested in writing RRs and reviewers who evaluate such submissions.