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Isn't this the point of journals? They communicate new knowledge, which changes the status of what is known. There's a balance to be struck in how certain thes
by improbable22 9y ago
Isn't this the point of journals? They communicate new knowledge, which changes the status of what is known.
There's a balance to be struck in how certain these things should be before being published, for sure. The p-hacking plague is a symptom of setting this certainty bar too low, or equivalently, the required level of novelty too high.
Things which stay constant are the job of standards bodies, and textbook writers... these are important too, but different.
- squiggleblaz 9y agoI don't think so. If you work in a hard science like medicine or psychology, where problems are still so hard we can't produce clear answers as to results of a paper, we shouldn't really be trusting papers until they've been reproduced by some unrelated team. But if these results don't contradict the previous papers, they're not really communicating new knowledge. Sometimes this isn't a big deal (medicine is as far as I know regulated enough that reproduction is a part of the problem), but most science is characterised by not enough money distributed without caring about scientific outcomes. So we do have a problem at the moment. A team who does important but thankless scientific work can't get published. Too much science is just first draft status. And the only way to determine that is that people keep trying and trying to build on it and eventually decades later the tower of cards collapses when clever new PhD students start down new research avenues.
- gowld 9y agohttp://www.jnr-eeb.org/index.php/jnr http://www.jnr-eeb.org/index.php/jnr