Registered Reports

Since 2020 Nature Communications has been considering Registered Reports for publication in the areas of cognitive neuroscience, human behaviour and psychology, and epidemiology. We are excited to announce the publication of our first Registered Report. With this milestone, we also want to open the format to all other areas of research.

Nature Communications are pleased to announce that we are now considering Registered Reports for publication in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, human behaviour and psychology, as well as epidemiology.

We recently published our first Registered Report entitled ‘Value-free random exploration is linked to impulsivity’. We believe the format offers many benefits to strengthen hypothesis-driven research and are keen to share our experience with our readers as we open up the format to all fields of research. We interviewed the authors of the manuscript (Magda Dubois and Tobias Hauser) and one of the reviewers (Trevor Robbins) about their experience of the review process. We are editorially committed to take their comments on board to further improve our guidance and to optimally support our future authors.

Nature Communications is now welcoming Registered Report submissions from all fields of research (read our editorial here), and we want to encourage submissions from the ecology and evolutionary biology fields. To introduce this format to researchers in those fields, we interviewed two founding members of the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE), a network of researchers aimed at improving research practices in ecology, evolutionary biology, and related fields: Shinichi Nakagawa (Professor of Evolutionary Ecology and Synthesis at the University of New South Wales, UNSW) and Rose O’Dea (Secretary of SORTEE, postdoctoral researcher and fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). Below, they share their thoughts on how the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology can advance in reproducibility and transparency.

The authors investigated memory distortions in participants with dysphoria who did not have a diagnosed mental illness. The participants retrieved positive memories with diminished details and emotions, but negative memories with enhanced details and normal or enhanced emotions.

Deciding between known rewarding options and exploring novel avenues is central to decision making. Humans show variability in their exploration. Here, the authors show that impulsivity is associated to an increased usage of a cognitively cheap (and sometimes sub-optimal) exploration strategy.