Conversation with Joshua Miller, PhD

Joshua D. Miller, PhD, is Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology and chair of the clinical program at the University of Georgia, as well as the editor-in-chief of APA journal Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment. Miller studies the connections between personality and psychopathology, focusing particularly on personality disorders related to externalizing difficulties like narcissism and psychopathy.

In this interview, Miller discusses the steps that he and his team have taken to encourage open science adoption in his journal.

For all of psychological science, “open science” means placing a strong priority on transparency and rigor in the hopes of improving the robustness and replicability of our science. By all accounts, personality science has largely fared well when examined against other disciplines in terms of replicability and statistical power but this does not suggest that open science approaches need not be instantiated in our journals. For instance, very few of the articles submitted to PDTRT include preregistration and/or open data, code, and materials at this point in time. It is my hope that these percentages will increase meaningfully over the next few years as researchers adapt to and adopt these practices.

We have adopted a number of steps to encourage open science at PDTRT. This includes encouraging preregistration and requiring that all manuscripts note whether the study was preregistered or not. We are also one of only a handful of clinically-oriented APA journals that accept registered reports, which we feel are an excellent way of prioritizing open and robust practices while minimizing results-driven reviewing and biases against the null. Third, we have adopted Stage 2 of the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines. We have also created a new position—the open science consulting editor—who reviews all submitted manuscripts that are preregistered to make sure the manuscript and preregistration documents align. This takes the pressure off of peer reviewers to have to carefully read the preregistration in order to document any inconsistencies, which we feel may be too burdensome for many overworked reviewers. Finally, we’ve adopted the CRediT taxonomy that allows authors to clearly and transparently note the various contributions made by the authorship team.

There is a plethora of published materials available including manuscripts that detail the replication crisis (e.g., OSC, 2015), practices that contribute including p-hacking (e.g., Simmons et al., 2011), HARKing (Kerr, 1998), selective reporting of conditions, manipulations, predictors/outcomes, and low statistical power (e.g., Bishop, 2019). There are also excellent papers on the need for clinical psychologists to get involved in these practices (Tackett et al., 2017, 2019).

Of course, the Center for Open Science’s OSF is a wonderful resource for all aspects—it is where preregistrations can be listed, as well as data, code, and materials. There are helpful “how tos” for registered reportsopens in new window and preregistrationopens in new window there as well.

The leadership at PDTRT is strongly invested in supporting and furthering open science and, thereby, improving personality disorder research. We’d like to see more manuscripts that are replications of important studies, that include preregistration or, better yet, use a registered report approach, that earn badges for open data, code, and/or materials. Submissions that use these approaches garner significant editorial attention and can only increase the likelihood that the manuscript might ultimately be deemed acceptable for publication at PDTRT.