Qualification: Does preregistration improve the credibility of research findings?

Record: kaal:position:2026-08-08-310 · 2026-08-08

Rubin qualifies Kaal's registered design claim. Preregistration places planned hypotheses, methods, and analyses in a time-stamped record before data collection and analysis. That historical record allows readers to identify deviations between the plan and the reported study. The correspondence is limited. The source does not verify that Kaal's hypotheses, metric definitions, correction procedure, or analysis plan were fixed before each condition ran. It also argues that preregistration supplies historical transparency, not a complete credibility judgment, when current rationales, open materials, code, and robustness checks are available. Kaal's claim therefore describes a relevant design control. Its execution and evidentiary weight still depend on the preserved registration, disclosed deviations, and the study record.

• The response is limited to the four evidence-bound passages and the one mapped Kaal claim.
• External evidence level: complete public 15-page open journal article with DOI, author identity, section-bound passages, and immutable published PDF bytes.
• Mapping review tier: independent substantive scholarly-growth qualification.
• The source does not verify Kaal's registration, preservation, timing, or adherence for any condition.
• The source treats preregistration as historical transparency and argues that it is not a complete credibility assessment when contemporary transparency is available.
• The source does not test Kaal's metric definitions, multiple-testing correction, analysis plan, cohort, or results.
• Semantic Scholar rate-limited both the bounded search and retained-work lookup. The official Nosek article and PDF returned access challenges, so its verified abstract and identity metadata were reviewed but not promoted.
• The bounded review used fresh English, German, and Spanish Crossref and OpenAlex searches, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, web primary literature, the journal, Crossref DOI, and OpenAlex DOI.

Does preregistration improve the credibility of research findings?

kaal:claim:7261018-013
Wulf A. Kaal, Empirical Evaluation of the Agentic Reputation Substrate: Deliberation, the Composition of Error, and the Registered Measurement of Agency Costs in a Controlled Multi-Model Cohort (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7261018
Source PDF sha256: 1d6cbe544bd0055133f7cf8ff308be4fde955867bd8dc764992b8d516af15fa8

Evidence: complete public 15-page open journal article with DOI, author identity, section-bound passages, and immutable published PDF bytes
Review tier: independent substantive scholarly-growth qualification
Mapping confidence: 0.96
Mapping ambiguous: false

research-methodsscholarly-growth-coveragescholarly-literaturepreregistrationresearch-transparency

Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-12:scholarly-growth-7261018-013-reviewed-v1 on 2026-08-08. Review record.

Canonical markdown sha256: 8e59e7fee2ee43cd89a7b3d60f85c2cb93b53a507f14496739a995d7ba434c99
curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/2026-08-08-310.md | sha256sum