What’s the best preregistration template set for common study designs?

If by “best” you mean best default set to cover the common study designs, I’d use OSF as the home base and choose the template by design. OSF itself explicitly says it doesn’t recommend one universal template; its current collection includes general, secondary-data, qualitative, systematic-review, simulation, EEG/ERP, eye-tracking, and other specialized forms.OSF Support

A practical template set

My default recommendation

If you're building a lab-wide preregistration toolkit, I'd keep these five:

1. OSF Preregistration — default for ordinary quantitative studies.
2. AsPredicted — lightweight option for straightforward studies.
3. PRP-QUANT — detailed option for psychology.
4. OSF Secondary Data — existing datasets.
5. OSF Qualitative — qualitative/mixed-methods work.

Then add the specialized OSF forms only when you actually have EEG/ERP, eye-tracking, systematic reviews, or simulation studies.

One important point: don't interpret a longer template as inherently better preregistration. The useful part is making the decisions that could otherwise be made after seeing the data explicit—especially hypotheses, outcomes, sample size, exclusions, preprocessing, statistical models, contrasts/covariates, and exploratory analyses. OSF's guidance emphasizes exactly these elements.OSF Support+1

If you tell me your field (e.g. psychology, neuroscience, education, economics, medicine, ecology) and the 3–5 study designs you use most, I can give you a minimal template stack and say which sections I’d actually require in each one.

If you mean a practical “template library” that covers most common designs, I’d use OSF as the home base, then switch templates when the design has special preregistration needs. OSF currently offers dedicated forms for several of these designs.OSF Support+1

If you only want a small set

I'd keep these five in a lab's standard toolkit:

1. OSF Preregistration — default for most quantitative studies.
2. AsPredicted — lightweight option for straightforward experiments.
3. PRP-QUANT — quantitative psychology when you want more specificity.
4. OSF Qualitative Preregistration — qualitative/mixed-methods work.
5. OSF Generalized Systematic Review Registration — reviews/meta-analyses.

OSF is particularly convenient because the registrations are formally time-stamped/locked and can be made public or embargoed; the important methodological point is to clearly distinguish what was specified prospectively from what was decided later.PubMed Central (PMC)+1

One caveat: “best” depends heavily on what you want the preregistration to accomplish. A short AsPredicted registration can be perfectly appropriate for a simple experiment, whereas using it for a complicated longitudinal or secondary-data analysis can leave important researcher degrees of freedom unspecified.

If you tell me your field (e.g. psychology, neuroscience, economics, education, biology) and 3–5 designs you commonly run, I can turn this into a one-page lab preregistration template set, including exactly which sections to require for each design.

The "best" preregistration template depends heavily on your specific study design, methodology, and how granular you need your plan to be. The Center for Open Science hosts standard templates on the OSF Registries , alongside streamlined alternatives like AsPredicted.[cos.io](https://www.cos.io/blog/choosing-preregistration-template-guide-for-researchers)[[2](https://osf.io/zab38/wiki)](https://osf.io/zab38/wiki)

The top-recommended preregistration template sets categorized by common study designs include the following:

• AsPredicted Template
  • Best for: Simple, straightforward experimental or survey designs and researchers new to preregistration.
  • Why use it: It features a concise, standardized 8-question format covering hypotheses, data collection stopping rules, outliers/exclusions, and primary analyses. Most journals instantly recognize and accept this format.[cos.io](https://osf.io/m3spx/overview)[[2](https://osf.io/zab38/wiki)](https://www.cos.io/blog/choosing-preregistration-template-guide-for-researchers)[[3](https://osf.io/m3spx/overview)](https://osf.io/zab38/wiki)
• OSF Standard Preregistration (“Preregistration Challenge” Template)
  • Best for: Standard confirmatory laboratory experiments, randomized controlled trials (RCTs), and psychology/behavioral studies.
  • Why use it: It is comprehensive, walking you through rigorous, step-by-step documentation of variables, experimental design, exact blinding procedures, and specific statistical models.[cos.io](https://www.cos.io/blog/choosing-preregistration-template-guide-for-researchers)
• Secondary Data Pre-Registration Template
  • Best for: Studies analyzing existing datasets where data collection has already occurred, but you haven't yet looked at the specific variables or run tests for your research question.
  • Why use it: It explicitly adapts questions to address access constraints, data subsets, and pre-existing knowledge of the data, ensuring clear separation from exploratory data mining.
• Qualitative Preregistration Template (Haven & van Grootel)
  • Best for: Primarily qualitative or mixed-methods research (e.g., interviews, thematic analysis, ethnography).
  • Why use it: Traditional templates focus heavily on p-values and sample size power calculations. This specialized template adapts the preregistration framework to outline sampling strategies for text/interviews, coding frameworks, and qualitative inference criteria.[cos.io](https://osf.io/j7ghv/overview)[[2](https://osf.io/zab38/wiki)](https://osf.io/zab38/wiki)
• Replication Recipe (Brandt et al.)
  • Best for: Direct or conceptual replications of published studies.
  • Why use it: It ensures you document precisely what is being copied from the original study, what deviations (if any) are intentional, and how success or failure of the replication will be statistically evaluated.[cos.io](https://osf.io/zab38/wiki)

If you want to narrow this down, tell me:

• What is your study design (e.g., experimental, correlational, qualitative, secondary data)?
• Are you planning to register on a specific platform like OSF or AsPredicted?

I can recommend the exact template that fits your project.

If you want a small, practical template set that covers most research designs, I’d use OSF as the default registry and switch templates based on the design. OSF itself lists the standard OSF Preregistration as its most commonly used general-purpose form, alongside several design-specific templates.OSF Support

OSF currently provides all of these specialized options.OSF Support+1

If I were setting up a lab-wide standard

I'd make the decision rule:

1. Default → OSF Preregistration
2. Psychology → PRP-QUANT when the additional detail is worthwhile
3. Existing dataset → Secondary Data Preregistration
4. Replication → Replication Recipe
5. Qualitative → Qualitative Preregistration
6. Review → Generalized Systematic Review
7. Simulation → Simulation Studies
8. Very simple study → AsPredicted

The key distinction is template vs. registry: these are largely different ways of specifying your plan; OSF is the repository/registration infrastructure. An ordinary preregistration gives you a timestamped record, whereas a Registered Report adds peer review of the study plan before the results are known.CASRAI+1

For most quantitative studies, I'd personally choose OSF Preregistration over AsPredicted unless brevity is the priority. The more comprehensive template forces you to specify things like sampling/stopping rules, variables, exclusions, statistical models, missing data, and confirmatory vs. exploratory analyses—exactly the decisions where analytical flexibility can otherwise creep in.pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

help.osf.io

If you tell me your field + 2–3 study designs you commonly run, I can also give you a minimal “house preregistration template” that combines the best parts of these into one decision-tree/checklist.

If you mean “what template should I actually use for different kinds of studies?”, I’d use OSF as the default ecosystem, then switch to a specialized template when the design warrants it. OSF currently offers general and design-specific templates, including secondary-data, qualitative, EEG/ERP, eye-tracking, systematic-review, simulation, and replication templates.OSF Support+1

My recommended template set

If you only want one template

Use OSF Preregistration.

It's the safest general-purpose choice: OSF describes it as its standard, comprehensive template, and it remains the most broadly applicable option.OSF Support+1

If you're doing psychology

I'd actually consider PRP-QUANT the better default for a conventional quantitative psychology paper. It's specifically intended for quantitative psychological studies, and the APA describes its newer preregistration standards as deliberately thorough and designed to encourage detailed upfront planning.PreReg+1

The important distinction

Don't choose based solely on the statistical test. For example, an ANOVA vs. regression isn't usually enough reason to use different templates. Choose based on what creates distinctive researcher degrees of freedom:

• Primary data + conventional experiment → OSF/PRP-QUANT
• Existing data → Secondary Data template
• Replication → Replication Recipe
• Qualitative → Qualitative template
• Systematic review/meta-analysis → Systematic Review template
• Simulation → ADEMP
• Specialized measurement modality → modality-specific template
• Peer-reviewed preregistration → Registered Report

One other point: preregistration is not the same thing as a Registered Report. A normal OSF preregistration timestamps your planned study; a Registered Report adds journal peer review of the plan before the results exist.CASRAI

If you tell me your field + study design (e.g., “2×2 randomized experiment with a survey outcome” or “secondary analysis of an existing longitudinal dataset”), I can recommend the exact template and give you a minimal-but-rigorous preregistration checklist for it.

For a preregistration template set that covers most common study designs, I’d use OSF Registries as the backbone, with a few specialized templates for cases where the generic form is a poor fit. OSF provides a broad set of templates, including general quantitative, qualitative, secondary-data, systematic review, simulation, replication, and method-specific forms.OSF Support

Recommended template set

If you want a lab-wide default policy

A practical three-template stack:

1. OSF Preregistration → default for ~80% of studies.OSF Support
2. AsPredicted → quick preregistration for straightforward confirmatory studies.CASRAI
3. Specialized OSF templates → whenever the design has unusual features (qualitative, secondary data, reviews, simulations, EEG, replications).OSF Support

A good rule of thumb: choose the most specific template that fits your design, but don’t force a specialized template when the generic OSF form already captures your decisions clearly.OSF Support

One additional distinction: a normal preregistration is a timestamped record of your planned methods and analyses; a Registered Report adds journal peer review before results are known.CASRAI