I guess we just fundamentally disagree on some things here. > The problem we're trying to solve isn't poor experimental design, it's a failure to publish "bori

I guess we just fundamentally disagree on some things here. > The problem we're trying to solve isn't poor experimental design, it's a failure to publish "boring" results--a bias against uninteresting results which should cause us to distrust any interesting result. I do not see the value in a quest to do boring and uninteresting research and publish it, even if the experimental methods are exquisite. The goal of PhD research is to explore and find something new or interesting to add to the scientific body. Graduates already cannot read all the interesting papers in their fields. If you add 10x more boring papers, they are never going to be read and will just be a waste of journal editor and reviewer time. > An inconclusive result does provide insight. If you have 1 study showing vaccines cause autism and 37651 studies which are inconclusive, that starts to be pretty conclusive. You can't add up 37651 insignificant results and say they equal a significant result. If there was a study with significant results showing no link between autism and the vaccine, it would get published (many such studies have been published). If your study just shows nothing, then most won't care because they can't learn much of anything from it. > If the results produced are "utterly garbage", then that really shows us that the "beautiful experimental designs" weren't actually effective. That is one of my points. Many experimental designs are beautiful and seem great, but then when researcher do the experiment many different issues can come up yielding little to no useful data. If you had to evaluate (for pre publication) every graduate students experiment ideas, you would run out of time! > You publish the thing you agreed to publish, mention the interesting phenomena in the analysis, and apply to study it. No one wants to read about the uninteresting experiment. They want to read about the interesting discovery and want learn about that. So, you publish the study of the interesting part and don't bother publishing the boring experiment. > A journal of Null Results already exists, and doesn't solve the problem because it's just reversing the publication bias. I guess I believe a bias towards publishing interesting studies with significant results is not a bad thing. Publishing inconclusive, uninteresting, or trivial findings does not add much value, if any, to the scientific body in my opinion. > An experiment that gets a null result is not a failure. An experiment which fails to observe the variable under test is a failure. If science is working correctly, I would expect the majority of correctly-performed experiments to produce null results, because the obvious phenomena have already been discovered. The idea that "interesting result = success and null result = failure" is fundamentally unscientific and needs to be stricken from the human consciousness. I don't believe "null result = failure", I believe many null results are not interesting and likely are not useful if published because many experiments do not produce useful data or significant results for a variety of reasons.