Discovery Lab Answers

The question — what fraction of psi studies were pre-registered, and has that grown over time — is a meaningful one, but the sources retrieved for this question do not contain a systematic count or time-series of pre-registration rates across the parapsychology literature. What they do contain is relevant context worth surfacing.

What the retrieved sources say

The retrieved sources touch on pre-registration in parapsychology adjacent ways, but none provides a field-wide rate or a longitudinal trend line:

• Walleczek et al. (2025) ^[3] explicitly distinguishes confirmatory (pre-registered) protocols from exploratory analyses within the same research program — and treats that distinction as load-bearing for interpreting results. Their framing treats pre-registration as the higher evidential standard, with exploratory findings requiring subsequent confirmatory replication before they can be credited.
• Bancel (2024) ^[2] discusses a study that concluded it “provided confirmatory evidence for a pre-registered micro-PK effect for one out of three” target groups — again using pre-registration as a categorical marker that separates the evidential weight of a finding from exploratory results in the same paper.
• The social psychology methods paper ^[1] notes that pre-registration “did not become a major force until quite recently” in psychological science generally, which supplies relevant context: parapsychology’s pre-registration rates, whatever they are, exist against a broader disciplinary baseline that was itself very low before roughly 2012–2015.

What the library does not supply

The retrieved excerpts do not contain:

• A field-wide count or percentage of pre-registered psi studies for any year or period
• A time series showing whether the rate has risen
• A meta-analysis that codes pre-registration status as a moderator variable across the psi literature

Whether such analyses exist in sources the library holds that were not retrieved for this question, or whether they have not yet been published as a standalone analysis, cannot be determined from what is here.

General context (not from the ESP-Nexus library)

For transparency: the broader picture from the open-science literature is that pre-registration in psychology generally expanded sharply after roughly 2013–2015 (the Open Science Collaboration, the Registered Reports format at journals like Cortex, and later PLOS ONE). Parapsychology journals — notably the Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition and the European Journal of Parapsychology — have published pre-registered studies, and individual researchers such as those in the Transparent Psi Project ^[3] have adopted formal confirmatory protocols. But a rigorous count of what fraction of psi studies carry pre-registration, and whether that fraction has grown at a measurable rate, is not something the retrieved sources establish — and this assistant will not supply a figure the sources do not contain.

If this is a question you are researching seriously, the Studies section codes each audited study’s design type (confirmatory vs. exploratory), which may be the closest thing the site currently offers to a structured record of pre-registration status study by study.