Negative Irreproducible Tweets For Science Publishing

New submitter mwolfam writes "Every scientist has at least one paper or graph tucked in a folder that lies in a dusty corner of the hard drive next to that dancing baby that used to be all the rage. The data is interesting, but doesn't lend itself to the creation of the grand narrative you must have for a traditional publication. It's time to expand traditional scientific publication to include a place for the data that normally falls through the cracks: short but interesting bits of data, negative results, and irreproducible results."

Comments

Traditional journals already do this.

[bkaul01]

Such a thing already exists: many journals (at least in my field) accept submissions for "technical notes" that aren't full-fledged papers, but merely describe a brief, interesting bit of data, etc. It's more a question of whether the researcher has any incentive to put the time into writing them up and submitting them than a problem of a lack of venues for us to do so.

Re:Traditional journals already do this.

[kharchenko]

Tweets are an abomination. You still have to describe what you've done properly, otherwise the reported result is of no value.
There are journals that were created specifically to report negative results. Irreproducible results, on the other hand, are not a scientific matter.

Re:Traditional journals already do this.

[grqb]

I think the tweet idea is slightly different. For example, a lot of work that a scientist does is collecting data to make sure equipment is working properly. Usually these experiments aren't worth publishing and probably wouldn't make it past a peer review because 1) they're usually not novel experiments 2) they don't tell a story or add much value, but I think it could be useful to share this type of data. I mean, if you've collected it, why not share it?

More Tweets in a cacophony

[ackthpt]

Well, if it gets it out there, but why Twitter? It's going to have to compete with all the usual garbage which is trending.

Brett6565 Vampires in yet another TV show :P #fail #bloodsuckers

Wignut Yankees sign another pitcher #goyanks

Waddleduck Another show about lawyers #fail #bloodsuckers

Cherbonevski sci.fi/fd98guyrr Nucleotides enzymolgy in e. nemtodii #science #wowwee #knowledge

yellomello Moar lolcat pictures of my kitty! bit.ly/r9d8gns9ds #LOL #CATS #LOLCATS

cityfied Tevez to Milan! Good-bye and don't let the door hit you on the arse on the way out! #MCFC #TEVEZ
 

Re:Of limited use

[tlhIngan]

While not a horribly bad idea, it would be of limited use. The reason science doesn't dwell on the odd irregular result, and especially on results that can't be reproduced, is that you cannot draw any conclusions from them.

Maybe not by itself, but sometimes interesting correlations pop up because of strange combinations. Or more likely, someone gets the results they were expecting, but sees an odd variance they can't explain. Perhaps if it was seen elsewhere, the odd data correllation may have some merit in investigation.

It's like an odd bug you find when using some software. You don't think it's important (perhaps it happens occasionally), but someone else decides to just mention it in passing, and then others chime in as it happened to them, and then hey, perhaps it's a bigger bug than expected.

Just putting it out there may bring others to notice they see the same thing as well and then provide incentive to do proper research in it.

Asimov's

[gmuslera]

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it) but 'That's funny...'

It's been done

[SoftwareArtist]

Journal of Failed Crystallization Experiments

Ok, some of the humor is a bit esoteric for those who don't know much molecular biology. You'll just have to take my word for it that it's really funny!

arXiv papers do not have to be in a journal

[ODBOL]

I am a moderator for arXiv, and I am quite sure that submissions are filtered only for prima facie relevance, and do not have to be "accepted in a journal." The format of arXiv is probably not suitable for all sorts of data, but lots of data can be presented as text and can be placed in arXiv.

All of this has been done / possible / etc.

[oneiros27]

For #1, there was The Journal of Earth Science Phenomena (hasn't had anything new in over a year), where they'd publish what they called 'micro-articles', which was mostly just a picture and a short description. Unlike a tweet, it actually had some peer-review, and enough information to make the item useful in its own regard. In solar physics, it's not a journal, but there's the Heliophysics Event Registry, where scientists can submit events/features/phenomena, but it's not peer reviewed. (and some are submitted via pipeline processing, so there might not've been any human involved in the detection other than writing the software)

For the negative results, there are plenty of dedicated journals in various fields, and if there isn't, there's always PLoS ONE. It's possible that they might take the irreproducable stuff, too. In their description, they say they'll take anything that's 'technically sound'. They do use a model that's different from other peer-reviewed journals, and go with the author-pays approach, which many of the other journals claim makes them invalid (yet, those same journals charge even more to make your article 'open access' if it gets accepted)