Researchers typically do not try to publish negative findings, but the new social-sciences journal, the Journal of Spurious Correlations, welcomes such data with open arms. The journal’s editors define negative findings as “those that do not fit with the researcher’s own theoretical presuppositions or with accepted tenets of methodological appropriateness.”
Researchers do not seek to publish negative findings, they say, because journals have no interest in them. But a tremendous amount of potentially useful information is lost because of this “selective reporting of results,” they write. The journal aims to serve as a “forum for disseminating the rigorous but otherwise ‘unpublishable’ findings that are, strictly speaking, necessary products of … social-science research.”
The first issue, which is due out in 2007, concentrates on “opening areas of investigation into the definition and use of negative results in social sciences.”
Additional information about the journal, which will appear in print as well as online, is available at www.jspurc.org/main2.htm.
