Researchers propose preregistration in taxonomy to enhance transparency and credibility and reduce subjectivity

Abstract

A new opinion piece published in Megataxa today (Conix et al. 2023) calls for preregistration in the field of taxonomy and discusses its potential benefits and objections. Preregistration is a practice for researchers to document their hypotheses, design and methods of their proposed studies in a public repository before they start the study and collect the data (Nosek et al. 2018). It is believed that preregistration can help reduce bias, increase transparency, and improve study design (especially replicability) of research (e.g. Nosek et al. 2018; Krypotos et al. 2022), including exploratory research such as some aspects of biodiversity discovery and taxonomy (Dirnagl et al. 2020). While preregistration has been already employed in other fields such as social sciences (e.g. Camerer et al. 2016, 2018) and ecology/evolution (e.g. Kelly 2019), it has yet been adopted in taxonomy. Conix et al. (2023) argue that preregistration could be beneficial for taxonomy, given the challenges it faces, such as subjectivity, disagreement, and credibility: