> Pre-registration only assures that your study will not get any worse than it was the first time you thought of it, which may be very bad indeed. > > Searching

> Pre-registration only assures that your study will not get any worse than it was the first time you thought of it, which may be very bad indeed. > > Searching for publication bias only means you will get all of the confounded studies, instead of just some of them. No, pre-registration assures that when you do a study and get a negative result, you don't simply forget to publish it - helping to reduce publication bias. But also, it prevents you from changing what you were looking for (because that's part of the pre-registration data) and "data dredging" for something that looks like a positive result, helping to reduce p-hacking - specifically of the "Texas sharpshooter fallacy" variety.