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Well, this one might be... It is very often the case that a hypothesis is suggested by our partial knowledge, and in those cases, it would seem paradoxical to

Well, this one might be... It is very often the case that a hypothesis is suggested by our partial knowledge, and in those cases, it would seem paradoxical to put it aside and set off on a random search for whatever. Many of the problems outlined here seem to arise from attempting to force a hypothesis where there are no clear candidates.

smoyer 6y ago
We've seen so many cases where research is actually invalidated because the researcher made a hypothesis after collecting their data (most often discarding the hypothesis they had before collecting their data). This process occurs with enough frequency that it's even earned the moniker "p-hacking". So I'd propose the opposite - and this is in line with people who are way smarter than I am - publish your hypothesis before you start your study. I'd recommend the "Everything Hertz" podcast for a lot of cogent discussion around both study quality and open access. As an aside, I think that we should be rewarding those who publish the results of their "broken" research. There is value in knowing a negative result - something we use frequently in engineering (one reason we prototype everything before sending it off to production). Right now, there's almost an institutional shame in reporting "no results". In theory, there should be a bunch of really short papers "no results" published for every break-through study.