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Just gonna leave a quick link to my favorite general-purpose academic journal: http://www.jasnh.com/ http://www.jasnh.com/ The Journal of Articles in Support o

by mherdeg 12y ago

Just gonna leave a quick link to my favorite general-purpose academic journal: http://www.jasnh.com/ http://www.jasnh.com/ The Journal of Articles in Support of Null Hypothesis collects experiments that didn't work. Not very much volume, not a huge area of prestige, but there should be no shame in publishing there. The content is very diverse and pretty fun. Titles like "No Effect of a Brief Music Intervention on Test Anxiety and Exam Scores in College Undergraduates"; "Parenting Style Trumps Work Role in Life Satisfaction of Midlife Women"; "Does Fetal Malnourishment Put Infants at Risk of Caregiver Neglect Because Their Faces Are Unappealing?"; "Is There an Effect of Subliminal Messages in Music on Choice Behavior?". Plenty more cool stuff.

chrisBob 12y ago
This is interesting, but I think there needs to be an option that takes the next step. While this journal is for psychology only I would like to see a broad Journal of Negative Results. This would help limit repeated, failed experiments, and could do as much to help new discoveries as the current publications which are a collection of techniques that happened to work. Everyone says you should learn from your mistakes, but then they are never shared for others to learn from.
- mherdeg 12y ago
  Yeah, it does seem like in general in science, we only see "we tried to do X and it didn't work" papers AFTER someone has published a paper that says "surprisingly, we tried to do X which shouldn't work and it did!". The example that comes to mind is pluripotent stem cells (see e.g. discussion at http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0050338 http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo... ) where publications only really advance knowledge about the "dogma" of a field when someone finds a way to publish results that oppose it.

by mherdeg 12y ago

chrisBob 12y ago

This is interesting, but I think there needs to be an option that takes the next step. While this journal is for psychology only I would like to see a broad Journal of Negative Results. This would help limit repeated, failed experiments, and could do as much to help new discoveries as the current publications which are a collection of techniques that happened to work. Everyone says you should learn from your mistakes, but then they are never shared for others to learn from.

mherdeg 12y ago
Yeah, it does seem like in general in science, we only see "we tried to do X and it didn't work" papers AFTER someone has published a paper that says "surprisingly, we tried to do X which shouldn't work and it did!". The example that comes to mind is pluripotent stem cells (see e.g. discussion at http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0050338 http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo... ) where publications only really advance knowledge about the "dogma" of a field when someone finds a way to publish results that oppose it.