[HN Gopher] New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' r...
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New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research
rejected by others
Author : apsec112
Score : 151 points
Date : 2020-08-20 21:32 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbc.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbc.ca)
| 60secz wrote:
| Null Hypothesis quarterly needs to be on every coffee table.
| nippoo wrote:
| Related (but more general): the Journal of Articles in Support of
| the Null Hypothesis, https://www.jasnh.com
| eloff wrote:
| Good, science needs more of this. A negative result is a result,
| and if you don't publish it, then you end up skewing the
| distribution of results. Which can lead to people (and meta
| studies) drawing incorrect conclusions.
| kraetzin wrote:
| Half of my PhD thesis is considered "unpublishable" because,
| after doing the work, my supervisors felt it's actually
| "unsurprising" that it didn't work out. We took methods that had
| been exploited to improve on previous results for over a decade
| to their logical extreme, and found that this method no longer
| leads to improvements. After doing the work it seems obvious. A
| paper on the subject would almost be considered uninteresting,
| and a high ranking journal would ignore it (which is why it's
| considered "unpublishable"). However, nobody has published this
| information, and it would help others to not make the same
| mistake.
|
| I wonder how many times similar "mistakes" have been made by PhD
| students across disciplines.
| notagoodidea wrote:
| By experience, I want to say : way too much. Journals and
| published articles looks like a research lab full of PhD
| working on their owns without access to all the previous
| results of the labs (good, bad and everything in between) and
| do not talk to others unless they have a 10 minutes seminar
| every six months to show some stuff quickly.
| owenshen24 wrote:
| That sucks to hear. Null results are important, as you say, if
| only to dissuade others from doing the same.
|
| See also the "file-drawer problem"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias). Also, with
| regards to the incentives in the field and the lack of null
| results, there's always Ioannidis's classic work (https://journ
| als.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...).
| klysm wrote:
| The problem is researchers aren't going to want/be able to spend
| the time to properly document negative/unsurprising results. The
| financial incentives in place don't support it despite its
| incredible value.
| throwawayiionqz wrote:
| The challenge of modern academia in certain fields is not to
| publish but to be read by others. Everyone is so busy publishing
| that very few papers get decent readership (retweets and
| citations happen mostly without reading the substance).
|
| I would rather have an upper limit on the number of papers one
| can publish in a year than more avenues to publish unsubstantial
| findings.
| onurcel wrote:
| I like the idea but I don't really get why they accept
| "statistically insignificant" results. What I expect from a
| scientific paper is to prove (even emprically) something. For
| example, if a paper claims something like "we show that using
| method X instead of Y doesn't improve the results", it won't get
| published on most journals... except this one, which is awesome,
| but the paper still has to prove that claim.
| walty wrote:
| If you only publish the positive results, you miss the context
| of the unsurprising results. For example, in
| https://xkcd.com/882/ , if the results from all the experiments
| in the comic were published, the public would know that the
| "Green Jellybeans cause acne" result is probably a fluke.
| progval wrote:
| Doesn't "statistically insignificant" mean papers which
| conclude something like "we find no correlation between X and
| Y"?
| kelnos wrote:
| I think information like that is perhaps useful, at least to
| avoid wasting time repeating the same research, but
| publishing that does not prove that there's no correlation
| between X and Y, only that the things tested didn't show one.
| dguest wrote:
| You can't _ever_ prove that switching to X doesn 't change the
| result. All you can really hope for is putting smaller limits
| on the amount by which something could be improved.
|
| For one dumb example: if you wanted to see if rats can fly, you
| might observe 100 rats and see that none of them fly away. But
| this doesn't prove anything: in reality even if 3% of rats
| could fly you'd get this result about 5% of the time. You've
| really shown with 95% confidence is that less than 3% of rats
| fly.
| acchow wrote:
| If the only goal is p 0.05 and there's many groups around the
| world trying the same experiment, we should hope that they all
| publish their non-results otherwise by chance someone is going
| to have a significant result just by luck.
| bboy13 wrote:
| When you open the field to reward research itself rather than
| p-hacking, everyone benefits.
|
| It's like a flea market. Bargain bin discounts, junk to many,
| valuable to some, but it shifts the economics of the whole
| system and lets specialty niche researchers not have to
| reinvent the wheel.
|
| Also, knowing that a method or study was statistically
| insignificant is statistically significant for future study
| design.
|
| Thanks!
| timwaagh wrote:
| this is old news from last year, also there seems to be only one
| issue with one article, which means this project is stillborn.
| https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/14932/browse?type=d...
| whatever1 wrote:
| We also need a journal to publish methods that failed. I did so
| much work during my PhD that was dead end and is not documented.
| xncl wrote:
| Chemistry is so bad for this. That and how everything is behind
| a paywall that only multinationals and universities have access
| too.
| auraham wrote:
| I support this. Although a journal may not accept that kind of
| work, you can still publish it in your blog.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| there was a journal of negative results in biomedicine, but i
| don't think they've published since 2017.
| DonCopal wrote:
| https://www.journalnetwork.org/journals/international-journa...
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