Write a PREreview

Publicly accessible research record is often assessed through the availability of individual artifacts: preregistrations, protocols, data, materials, code, preprints, and final reports. Availability, however, does not establish that these objects can be followed as parts of the same research process. Recent lifecycle-open-science work calls for plans, outputs, and outcomes to remain transparent, accessible, linked, and findable over time. Existing metaresearch has measured registration practices, data and code sharing, reporting transparency, and discrepancies between registrations and later reports. Other work has developed technical systems for representing provenance and relationships among research objects. What remains less directly measured is whether an independent research consumer can begin from a prospective public research plan and correctly identify the outcome that belongs to that plan by following the public record itself.This preregistered metaresearch study introduces research-lifecycle traceability as a reader-facing property of the public research record. Traceability is distinguished from artifact availability, relational connectedness, and reconstructive burden. A retrospective cohort of public prospective registrations will undergo independent two-stage auditing. During record-only reconstruction, evaluators will begin from each registration and may follow only links available through the starting record and directly connected project pages. External search will be prohibited. After those judgments are locked, a separate reconstruction stage will establish whether a qualifying public outcome exists and identify the correct outcome where possible. The primary analysis will be restricted to registrations with independently confirmed public outcomes. The primary estimand is the proportion of such studies for which both evaluators correctly reach the outcome during record-only reconstruction. Secondary analyses will examine linkage direction, persistent identifiers, associated research artifacts, broken paths, ambiguous matches, and reconstruction time. The study tests whether publicly available research artifacts routinely form a public record that can actually be followed from plan to outcome.