to be published as positive ones. Rubin (2020) re-
fer to this as avoiding the suppression of a priori
hypotheses that yield null or disconﬁrming results.
Publication bias is claimed to be a serious problem
in NLP research by many (Plank et al., 2014; Card
et al., 2020; Cohen et al., 2021). The argument
was also used in epidemiology, but received some
pushback (Loder et al., 2010). See also §5.
Flag-planting Van Miltenburg et al. (2021) also
suggest preregistration can prevent so-called ﬂag-
planting. Flag-planting refers to rushing to be the
ﬁrst to publish results. Flag-planting potentially
comes at the cost of scientiﬁc integrity and quality.
Because of biases in peer-reviewing, it is harder
to publish a corrected version of a study that is
already out there, than to publish an error-prone
study that is the ﬁrst of its kind. See also §6.
Other Reasons to Preregister We have covered
the main reasons van Miltenburg et al. (2021) had
for adopting preregistration and will now move
A Two-Sided Discussion of Preregistration of NLP Research