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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.
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.
I wonder how many times similar "mistakes" have been made by PhD students across disciplines.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't "statistically insignificant" mean papers which conclude something like "we find no correlation between X and Y"?
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…
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://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...).
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.