Registered reports coming soon: our contribution to better science in football research

Abstract

Sport science research like any other field suffers from what has been called ‘questionable research practice’, a likely consequence of the ‘publish or perish’ culture, that is, the pressure in academia to produce scientific articles (John et al. 2012). A more recent reason that is specific to the field of football research may also be attributable to the growing number of practitioners from team sports publishing scientific articles although they may not have had the appropriate training in research methodology to the level required for robust science. John et al. (2012) reported a series of bad practices that were admitted by a sample of 2155 academic psychologists relating to their research field: