Support of the Null Hypothesis

Timothy Teräväinen pointed to an interesting journal, the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis:

In the past other journals and reviewers have exhibited a bias against articles that did not reject the null hypothesis. We seek to change that by offering an outlet for experiments that do not reach the traditional significance levels (p < .05). Thus, reducing the file drawer problem, and reducing the bias in psychological literature. Without such a resource researchers could be wasting their time examining empirical questions that have already been examined. We collect these articles and provide them to the scientific community free of cost.

I’ve three comments.

Branding: Perhaps more people would understand what this is about if the journal was titled, say, “Status Quo” or “Nothing new under the Sun”.

Topic or theme: Only statisticians would be instinctively attracted to a standalone topic like this. JASNH would work better as a subtopic (or a folksonomic “tag“) of every academic discipline, or a section of any journal. At the same time, it’s good to keep all such articles in one place.

Format: I am not sure it’s worth writing a whole article about a negative result. Instead of articles, some sort of a shorter write-up would be more efficient – people might not want to spend too much time elaborating on the support of status quo, but other researchers would benefit from knowing what is unlikely to work.