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Re:Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam by tbarbugli on Sunday December 24, 2017 @07:55AM (#15999325)
Years ago after spending uncountable beers listening to the frustration of several PhDs friends, I had the idea of a journal for research failures/dead-ends.

The idea was to look at unfruitful research as something useful for the community and give some credit to time and resources spent doing something that did not work (and should not repeated by others). I still wonder if that would create the wrong incentive though and if that could be feasible at all (who likes to talk about money and time wasted?)

EDIT: fixed wrong sentence

Re:Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam by hannob on Sunday December 24, 2017 @08:25AM (#15999415)
> I had the idea of a journal for research failures/dead-ends.

The problem is the following: If you seriously want to fix science you don't need one such journal. It would have to be the norm.

It's simply not plausible that the majority of empirical research leads to positive effects. Even if you publish a few negative results (or "failures") - that doesn't even begin to address the problem of publication bias seriously.

As long as the majority of scientific publications are not "failures" we should assume that the majority are false positives due to p-hacking or publication bias.

Re:Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam by haZard_OS on Sunday December 24, 2017 @08:44AM (#15999472)
There is a journal that does exactly that:

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/new-negatives-in-plant-scie...

On a slightly different note, I would love to see a section in journals devoted to publishing the results of duplicated experiments (performed by graduate students and interns, probably).

Re:Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam by chrisseaton on Sunday December 24, 2017 @08:11AM (#15999374)
> I had the idea of a journal for research failures/dead-ends

A bit like the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, the Journal of Negative Results — Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the psychology Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis?

> several phd undergraduate friends

People doing PhDs who are simultaneously undergraduates?

Re:Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam by haZard_OS on Sunday December 24, 2017 @08:45AM (#15999475)
Re:Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam by tbarbugli on Sunday December 24, 2017 @08:43AM (#15999470)
Just PhDs, the undergraduate bit was added by accident. Fixed my comment.
Re:Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam by brohee on Sunday December 24, 2017 @10:22AM (#15999874)
There is one : http://www.jasnh.com/