Fishing Expeditions and Harking Preregistra-
tion is often said to prevent ﬁshing expeditions
and so-called harking2 (Andrade, 2021), namely,
post-hoc characterization of hypotheses based on
experimental outcomes. Fishing expeditions is
ambiguous in the literature (between ﬁshing and
harking), but we use the term to refer to cherry-
picking dataset and protocols to validate a hypoth-
esis. Harking, in turn, is what researchers do
when they indiscriminately examine associations
between different variables, not with the intention
of testing a priori hypotheses but simply hoping
to ﬁnd something of signiﬁcance. Rubin (2020)
calls this ‘undisclosed hypothesizing after the re-
sults are known.’ Having authors preregister their
hypotheses potentially improves the reliability of
conﬁrmatory research by controlling for cherry-
picking and multiple hypothesis testing, implicit to
exploratory research. See also §4.
A Two-Sided Discussion of Preregistration of NLP Research