Registration guildelines

Please review these instructions before beginning a trial registration.

Accounts

You will need a valid account to register a trial. To create an account go to the Sign up page.

Trial Registration

Once you have a valid account, you can register a trial at the Trial Registration page. The person registering the trial is considered to be the primary principal investigator (PI). For studies with additional PIs, there are additional fields to enter their names, emails and affiliations. Email addresses are hidden from public view.

Required Information

To register a trial, you must complete the following fields:

  • Trial Title
  • Country (At least one)
  • Status
  • Keyword (At least one)
  • Abstract
  • Trial Start Date
  • Intervention Start Date
  • Intervention End Date
  • Trial End Date
  • Outcomes (End Points)
  • Experimental Design (Public)
  • Was the treatment clustered?
  • Planned Number of Clusters
  • Planned Number of Observations
  • Was IRB approval obtained (only for “In Development” and “On-going” trials)? If so, also
    • IRB Name
    • IRB Approval Date
    • IRB Approval Number

When a trial is registered before the start of its intervention, it is marked as a pre-registered trial with an orange clock icon.

Editing an existing trial

The user who created the trial, and those who have been added as a collaborator via their email accounts, can edit the trial. To edit a trial, sign into the site, find the trial you would like to edit and click “Edit Trial.” To see a list of all your trials, visit your My Trials page. Here, you will find a list of all your registered and unregistered trials.

Registration Review Criteria

As of January 5, 2017, draft trials will be reviewed for criteria that must be met before a research project is published in the AEA RCT Registry. Researchers should review the below criteria, and thoroughly inspect their entry before submitting their trial registration. The criteria is not intended to review the quality of the research, nor the ethics of the research. After submission for review, a reviewer has 15 days to review the draft, but the turnaround time is usually faster, ie. 1 to 2 business days.

As of March 1, 2017, registered draft trials will keep their original submission date and time.

Eligibility Requirements: The AEA RCT registry is only for Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) in the fields of economics, political science, and other social sciences. The RCT can be run anywhere in the world. However, it should not be used for clinical trials, which are not eligible because health journals that require preregistration will not accept registries in the AEA. Specifically, the AEA registry is not a government-sponsored registry, and was not designed to meet CONSORT guidelines since many of those fields are not appropriate for the social sciences. It therefore does not meet the clinicaltrials.gov or WHO criteria for being a clinical registry, and so medical journals will not accept manuscripts where the project was registered in the AEA registry versus a qualifying registry.

General Requirements:

  • We have recently updated our submission policies to require submissions to input information directly under relevant sections rather than refer to analysis plans. This helps better track changes between versions as well as improves data collection.

  • The registration should be written in English (with exceptions such as the trial title, organization names, etc.), such that an English-speaking reader can understand the research design and question.

  • Language should be clear and concise.

  • Entries should not have major spelling and grammatical errors.

  • Entries should be properly formatted, and in particular not have unreadable characters or symbols.

  • Information must be consistent throughout the registration. (i.e. consistency of dates, sample size)

  • Acronyms and abbreviations should be spelled out fully (with acronym in parentheses) the first time they are used.

  • All information is entered in the relevant and appropriate fields.

  • Duplicate registrations will be deleted.

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