Fostering registered reports adoption in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics

Research in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (CP&T) directly informs regulatory decisions, clinical guidelines, and individual prescribing, with major consequences for population health. Accordingly, CP&T research must meet the highest standards of robustness, trustworthiness, and reproducibility. Beyond rare cases of outright misconduct, a substantial grey zone of questionable research practices such as selective reporting, p hacking, HARKing, spin, and publication bias continues to undermine the credibility of the evidence base. These practices are reinforced by a publication ecosystem that often prioritizes novelty over methodological rigor.Registered Reports constitute a major structural innovation designed to address these shortcomings. By relocating peer review to the pre data collection stage, Registered Reports shift publication decisions away from study results toward the relevance of the research question and the rigor of the proposed methods. In principle acceptance is granted on the basis of methodological quality and clinical relevance, making publication decisions independent of results. This format discourages selective reporting and weak study design while allowing clearly identified exploratory analyses. Despite increasing adoption across scientific fields, implementation in CP&T remains limited.The Registered Report model is well suited to the range of study designs used in CP&T, including interventional trials, observational studies, and evidence syntheses. It aligns particularly well with confirmatory clinical trials and complements existing transparency initiatives such as trial registration and results reporting. For observational studies and meta analyses, Registered Reports provide a structured framework to limit analytical flexibility through prespecification and transparent documentation of deviations. Advancing the adoption of Registered Reports in CP&T will require coordinated action from journals, funders, regulators, and scientific societies. Through this proposal, we aim to build a community committed to their adoption in CP&T.