Timothy Teräväinen pointed to an interesting journal, the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis:
In the past other journals and reviewers have exhibited a bias against articles that did not reject the null hypothesis. We seek to change that by offering an outlet for experiments that do not reach the traditional significance levels (p < .05). Thus, reducing the file drawer problem, and reducing the bias in psychological literature. Without such a resource researchers could be wasting their time examining empirical questions that have already been examined. We collect these articles and provide them to the scientific community free of cost.
I've three comments.
Branding: Perhaps more people would understand what this is about if the journal was titled, say, "Status Quo" or "Nothing new under the Sun".
Topic or theme: Only statisticians would be instinctively attracted to a standalone topic like this. JASNH would work better as a subtopic (or a folksonomic "tag") of every academic discipline, or a section of any journal. At the same time, it's good to keep all such articles in one place.
Format: I am not sure it's worth writing a whole article about a negative result. Instead of articles, some sort of a shorter write-up would be more efficient - people might not want to spend too much time elaborating on the support of status quo, but other researchers would benefit from knowing what is unlikely to work.
Actually there are a couple of these types of journals:
* Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine: http://www.jnrbm.com
* Journal of Negative Results - Ecology and Evolutionary Biology: http://www.jnr-eeb.org
Journal of Interesting Negative Results (in NLP and ML): http://jinr.site.uottawa.ca/
Hah: we beat Simon's examples by insisting that they be *interesting*!
Aleks,
There is also rejecta mathematica:
http://math.rejecta.org/
Igor.
the idea of not throwing away results that don't meet p
Null results are not necessarily "status quo". In biomedicine, the consensus might be that there is an effect based on an initial "lucky" false positive study. A null result will then be a novelty compared to the initial study.
How about
"Results Known to be Mis-interpreted"
in other journals because of the informative censoring of results as (partially) evidenced here.
There's also this one:
http://www.jspurc.org/
A group of social scientists in Europe and the US has established a new journal of negative and unpublishable results in the social sciences. The mission of The Journal of Spurious Correlations (JSpurC) is to provide a legitimate venue for exploring pure and applied methodological questions in the social sciences in the company of colleagues without fear of professional embarrassment or reprisal.
There's also the Journal of Non-Significant Results in Education (although vol 1 issue 1 isn't out yet).
Inconclusive results and negative results are two different animals. A focus on parameter estimation or equivalence testing provides a path for the publication of results that have low difference testing pvals.
Unfortunately, you can get non significant p values for a lot of different, and often uninteresting, reasons. It seems like it would be very difficult to ensure that lack of statistical significance is due to absence of a true 'effect' rather than, say, poorly designed or constructed stimuli.
Unfortunately, you can get non significant p values for a lot of different, and often uninteresting, reasons. It seems like it would be very difficult to ensure that lack of statistical significance is due to absence of a true 'effect' rather than, say, poorly designed or constructed stimuli.
Presumably the articles will be peer reviewed so that poorly designed studies won't get published unless they are really, really, really interesting.