Journal Devoted to the Null Hypothesis

Xcott R13, 3(0,R4) writes "It may sound dull even for academia, but I personally am thrilled that someone is starting a journal devoted entirely to scientific research that fails to produce significant results. Researchers tend to publish successes, so we rarely ever read about experiments or approaches that didn't pan out, leaving future researchers to reinvent the square wheel. The "Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis" intends to make some of this valuable boring information available. And such a wonderful title: too bad it's an online journal, else I could put it on the bookshelf next to the Annals of Improbable Research. Causing an explosion that would destroy the Universe."

Comments

Re:Good idea...in theory...

[nucal]

I, and apparently my advisor who gave me the topic, were too dumb to pick up that this was a discontinued line of research.

Maybe you should consider a new thesis advisor (seriously). As a student, you would not be expected to know about this sort of thing, but your advisor seems way out of touch. This has a bigger impact on your future than you might think.

This is Psych, folks, not 'Hard' Science

[sailordave]

Read the Journal's website, folks -- it's a psych journal, not a mol-bio/physics/hard-science journal. Most of the posts here are getting this wrong.

This is in fact the reason why this journal is such a great idea. As a social science, the field of psychology has a much greater problem than fields like physics with dubious positive experiments getting overhyped -- the media will hype the one study that says the Internet turns kids into axe murders, but it doesn't mention the 99 other studies that found no relation.

Feynmann, in fact, wrote an article called 'Cargo-Cult Science', in which he attacked the discipline of psychology for not repeating experiments to check old results. Yes, he would 100% approve of this new journal.