A protocol is:
It's also a love letter to your future self!
These project take a lot of planning, decision making and time to complete. You will forget what you did or decided early on unless it is clearly written out. If you do most of the decision making during the planning process and record that in a thorough and clear protocol, you can move more easily through the project steps and deal more quickly with unexpected challenges.
These guidelines help identify what you want to record in a protocol. Use them with discretion - your project is unique based on the research aims, question and audience for which you are designing the project..
PRISMA-Protocol guidelines are for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, but JBI has guidance on adapting these guidelines for scoping reviews. You will need to adapt these guidelines for other review types. Most methods guidelines also have protocol guidance.
Templates should work alongside the guidelines to help you structure and complete the protocol.
Most templates are designed to be used by all types of evidence synthesis projects, which means some sections will not be relevant or need to be adapted for the specific project type you are conducting.
Public preregistration of a project protocol stems from the movement towards transparency, bias reduction, and accountability in open science.
Public preregistration of a protocol is required for publication of a systematic review for many journals. It is advised as a best practice for all evidence synthesis projects and some publishers will require it for a wide variety of review types.
Identify where you would most like to publish both the final manuscript and the protocol as early in the project as possible.
Some publishers require preregistration in specific places and formats. Some protocol registries have template and guidelines for you to follow.
For most projects, registering in OSF (see below) is sufficient unless the publication venue of your choice suggests otherwise.
There are some journals that will publish a protocol as a stand-alone article. These journals are generally expecting to also publish the final manuscript on completion of the project, and this process is known as 'registered reports.' A benefit of this process is that the protocol will go through peer review, providing additional opportunities for expert review and feedback.
Registration of a protocol is still recommended for thesis/capstone/dissertation projects that are not seeking further publication, but is ultimately at the discretion of program requirements or the faculty research advisor.
In these cases, the easiest venue for registration is the CSU digital repository, Mountain Scholar.
Registration = Publishing the protocol publicly at any point after the start of the project / date analysis, generally done for publication purposes
Preregistration = Publishing the protocol, publicly and/or in a version-controlled manner, before the start of the project or at least before the start of data analysis
Check with you intended publication venue. They may require preregistration or just registration or neither. If you do not know where you are planning to publish, preregister to be more thorough.
Generally this is unlikely. However, if this is a concern, some registration sites (such as OSF) allow you to embargo the registration so it is version controlled but not visible to the public. Check with the registration venue.
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