Kelsey Piper at Vox (This economics journal only publishes results that are no big deal):
Start with the name: Series of Unsurprising Results in Economics (SURE). The journal publishes papers with findings that are, well, really boring — so boring that other journals rejected them just for being boring. Its first paper, published Tuesday, is about an education intervention that was found to have no effects at all on anything.
But before you close this tab, hear me out. SURE is actually far from boring, even if the papers it publishes are guaranteed to be, as the name implies, unsurprising. In fact, it’s a pretty big deal, and a significant step toward fixing a major problem with scientific research.
SURE exists to fight “publication bias,” which affects every research field out there. Publication bias works like this: Let’s say hundreds of scientists are studying a topic. The ones who find counterintuitive, surprising results in their data will publish those surprising results as papers.
The ones who find extremely standard, unsurprising results — say, “This intervention does not have any effects,” or, “There doesn’t seem to be a strong relationship between any of these variables” — will usually get rejected from journals, if they bother turning their disappointing results into a paper at all.
That’s because journals like to publish novel results that change our understanding of the field. Null results (where the researchers didn’t find anything) or boring results (where they confirm something we already know) are much less likely to be published. And efforts to replicate other people’s papers often aren’t published, either, because journals want something new and different. ...
If you conducted a rigorous study but journals find your result too boring to publish, SURE will publish it. The hope is that this will fix the incentives for the whole field. More null results will get published, mitigating publication bias. Researchers can get a paper published even if they found null or unexciting results, which should discourage scouring their data for unreliable results.
If SURE works, hopefully it’ll be emulated — economics isn’t the only field that needs it. While exciting results get headlines, it’s the boring results that often do the most to add to our knowledge of the world. Those boring results deserve a journal of their own.
Funny story. A co-author was presenting one of our papers at a conference. The paper has an interesting result that has not appeared in the literature before. The result is intuitive and it advances what we know incrementally. The kind of result that gets published in a second-tier journal. At the end of the presentation an audience member offered the very unhelpful, wasting time to hear himself (of course, it's a guy) speak comment: "I don't find it surprising that [results our paper]". As if, surprise is the goal of research. Now, maybe surprise is the goal if you are aiming at the top journals and a big surprising result is the only way that you can hit those journals, but if you are one of the rank and file trying to sincerely advance knowledge in your niche the incremental result is what you are after. So, I think this journal is a great idea. And I'm still steaming about what that guy tried to do to my co-author.
And don't get me started on trying to get replication papers published ... I'll write that post another day.
