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

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> 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"?

Maybe. If there are more such places, maybe there's a pattern, and we might 
learn something from that. It's also far easier to cite something for the claim 
that there are "no dinosaurs here" than having to burrow through the entire 
literature and then write "the literature contains no mention of dinosaurs, but 
maybe we've overlooked some extra-obscure paper, or too undiagnostic specimens 
were not published" or the like.

> Popper or Kuhn (can't remember which one it was who said that)

Popper. Kuhn is the one with "paradigm" and "revolution".

> 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.

Well, if you just run the same dataset through the same program with the same 
settings, I doubt even the JNR would accept that alone as a paper...
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