Psychology Editing and Proofreading Services

The study was preregistered, and the paper says so in the first line of the method. It also uses a different exclusion rule, a covariate that was not in the plan, and a sample size reached by stopping when the effect appeared. The preregistration is real and the deviations may all be defensible. What is not defensible is a reader having to open the plan to find out.

We edit what psychologists write — experimental and survey papers, preregistrations and registered reports, replication studies, meta-analyses and systematic reviews, clinical and applied psychology research, developmental and social psychology papers, measurement and scale work, and theses, articles and grant applications. Our editors work on the relationship between the plan and the paper.

Preregistration is only useful if the deviations from it are visible, and the failure is a paper that cites its plan and then departs from it silently. A plan followed exactly and a plan departed from with reasons are both fine; an unmarked departure is what damages the field. We work through these so a deviation table appears in the paper or its supplement, listing what was planned, what was done and why, since a reader will not otherwise compare them and a reviewer rarely does; so the confirmatory analyses are separated from the exploratory ones and labelled in every table, because an exploratory result presented in confirmatory clothing is the mechanism behind most failed replications; so the stopping rule is stated and followed, given that optional stopping inflates false positives substantially and is invisible in the results; so exclusions are reported against the preregistered criteria with the number removed by each; so a hypothesis that was preregistered and not supported is reported with the same prominence as one that was; so the sample size justification is given as it was planned rather than reconstructed; and so effect sizes and intervals are reported rather than p-values alone. Papers written this way are the ones that survive replication attempts.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished data, preregistrations before release and manuscripts under review. We are editors rather than psychologists or statisticians, and we offer no view on hypotheses, analyses or findings. What we can do is make the plan and the paper line up on the page.