RE: Journal of Negative Results -- Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

[Julia Heathcote <dinosaur@juliaheathcote.com>]

David Marjanovic wrote:

> No kidding. If you replicate existing results, or get 
> otherwise boring results, you are encouraged to publish them 
> there. Apart from that, it's an ordinary peer-reviewed journal.
> 
> http://www.jnr-eeb.org/

I wonder if there'll be much interest from palaeontologists?  I went to one
talk at GSA a few years ago, the whole point of which was that the fieldwork
attempted had been absolutely fruitless - no fossil find whatsoever.  Should
we be taking more note of places where there are "no dinosaurs here"?  It
struck me as rather pointless at the time, as presumably it only takes one
positive result to disprove the assertion that X area has no dinosaur
fossils, and render the research null and void.  But I accept if we all
chose not to publish results that could be disproved, a) it would be rubbish
science and b) none of us would publish anything.

However, I do see the point of replicating existing results.  On a
philosophical level, we should apparently be devoting all our time to
testing our peers' hypotheses, but then Popper or Kuhn (can't remember which
one it was who said that) never had their own work to do, grant applications
to submit or classes to teach evidently.  It doesn't take a lot of time to
check a cladistic analysis, especially if you already handily have the
dataset, so presumably this would be a great place to put those analyses
that do confirm someone else's conclusions.

Julia Heathcote