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

Not a new idea

[Spurion]

Richard Feynman was a very strong advocate of having somewhere to publish non-positive results. He was distressed by the credibility added to the existence of psychic powers, influence of star signs, alien abductions and so on, by scientific research. It arises from the fact that if you test your hypothesis to, say, the 5% level, then on average one in twenty researchers is going to get a false positive. People tend to publish the positive results, and the nineteen negative results get forgotten because they're boring, giving a misleading picture. Of course, all the research could be completely accurate, but the skewed statistics make that irrelevant.

So Feynman dearly wanted a Journal of the Null Hypothesis. I think I found that in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman".

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.

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

[4of12]

Turns out that line of research ran into a dead end five years ago. People don't go back and publish "oh, btw, we were wrong".

For a long time, too, I've thought that careful documentation of what does not work and why is just as important as what does work and why.

Publication of "How Great Idea Blah Doesn't Really Work" is vitally important to preventing other creative, thinking-outside-the-box people from chasing down the same dead end in the maze of symptoms of the truth.

However, if you expend a little effort you can find out many of these things in two ways:

1. At the leading edge, talk to people at conferences. Let them know what you're thinking and see what they say. Talk to several people, too. Of course you need to take debunking of your idea on a professional and not personal level. Also you have to be reasonably trusting that not everyone is out to scoop your great ideas.
2. Look carefully at the written articles in your field of interest. Many times in the introductions and conclusions there are little sentences that hint at why some things are not practical; often these sentences help to round out arguments that would other suggest that some harebrained scheme would cure the world's problems.