Dear Colleagues
As organizational scientists, we should be striving to produce useful and replicable research. Recently, how we (and really all sciences) conduct our research has been severely questioned. From overreliance on null hypothesis significance testing (NHST), to our relative disuse of inductive research methods, to outright fabrication of results, to unethical practices during the review process, and so on, we must take steps so that we (and the consumers of our research) have confidence that our findings are meaningful, replicable, and honest. To that end, earlier this year Journal of Business and Psychology launched a special initiative through which we invited authors to submit their work as Registered Reports. The purpose of this call is to re-launch this initiative by announcing the creation of a website designed to answer questions about how an author might submit via this mechanism and what information will be considered as most critical during the review of the proposals.
Our goal is to encourage authors to propose conceptually sound, interesting, and methodologically rigorous research without concern for whether the results will be statistically significant. Instead, we want the focus to be on the importance of the research question and the rigor of the research design. We should welcome the results from sound research no matter if they support proposed hypotheses, yield null results, or replicate (or fail to replicate) previous work. Simply speaking, well conceived, designed, and conducted research should form the corpus of knowledge. We believe this special initiative provides an opportunity to do just that.
· Grant writing. You have or are developing a grant proposal. The structure of submissions to the current initiative is largely the same as grant proposals.
· Your research team activities. Formalize your research design and planning activities in written form and submit for consideration.
· Doctoral student training. Excellent dissertation proposals are ideal candidates for this initiative.
· Ongoing research efforts. You have collected data (either explicitly as pilot work or as part of another effort) that may suggest interesting interpretations. You may want to build upon these results (proof of concept) and propose a second study. Such a project may ultimately be packaged together for consideration.
A website devoted to this initiative provides information regarding key elements that should be included in proposals and the process by which proposals will be reviewed. Browsers should be pointed to:
Special Initiative Leaders: