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Lessons learnt from registration of biomedical research

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 9–12 (2023)Cite this article

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Registration has been proposed as a possible solution to the reproducibility crisis in scientific research. In its more than 20 years of practice in biomedical research, registration has been valuable — but it is still largely limited to clinical trials, and its implementation is still largely inconsistent.

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Fig. 1: Number of registered open-access articles on PubMed Central across years and registries.
Fig. 2: Yearly registrations of interventional versus observational studies on ClinicalTrials.gov between 1999 and 2020.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the National Library of Medicine and the open source community for creating the open data and tools that made this work possible. We are also grateful to D. Zarin for helpful discussions. No dedicated funding was received. S.S. has been funded by the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University and as a scholar of the Stanford Data Science Initiative. C.A. has received funding from Uppsala University, Swedish Society of Medicine, Blanceflor Foundation, and Sweden-America Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA

    Stylianos Serghiou & John P. A. Ioannidis

  2. Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA

    Stylianos Serghiou, Cathrine Axfors & John P. A. Ioannidis

  3. Prolaio, Inc., Scottsdale, AZ, USA

    Stylianos Serghiou

  4. Stanford Prevention Research Center, Department of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA

    John P. A. Ioannidis

  5. Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA

    John P. A. Ioannidis

  6. Department of Statistics, Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford, CA, USA

    John P. A. Ioannidis

Authors
  1. Stylianos Serghiou
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  2. Cathrine Axfors
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  3. John P. A. Ioannidis
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Contributions

S.S. contributed to conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, software (creation of algorithms for conflicts of interest, funding and registration; modification of algorithms for data and code sharing), validation, visualization and writing (original draft). C.A. contributed to conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, validation and visualization. J.P.A.I. contributed to conceptualization, methodology, project administration and supervision. All authors contributed to writing (review and editing). Reported as per CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) guidelines.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to John P. A. Ioannidis.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Discussion, Supplementary Figure 1, Supplementary Table 1

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Serghiou, S., Axfors, C. & Ioannidis, J.P.A. Lessons learnt from registration of biomedical research. Nat Hum Behav 7, 9–12 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01499-0

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