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LiveScience is reporting on experiments done by researchers at three universities trying to replicate Daryl Bem‘s 2010 claim that he had found scientific proof of psychic ability. The researchers Stuart Ritchie of the University of Edinburgh, University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman and University of London psychologist Christopher French all conducted the experiment separately at their respective universities with 50 participants each.
- One big problem facing the work is reluctance on the part of journals to publish studies with negative findings, especially those that are replications.
There is a Journal of Negative results in Biomedicine, however I am not sure that there is one for psychology. There should be.
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Very true. I think that will be a real benefit of the move to online 'journals'. Studies can not only be categorized by date of publication, but also categorized by subject matter and articles that they cite. Things are moving in this direction, but I imagine that scientific publishing 20 years from now will be significantly different.
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I think its because although negative results are obviously sometimes very important and interesting, they're not very exciting. I would suppose that there aren't that many negative results studies even being submitted for publication, not necessarily that journals won't publish them. No graduate student wants to write a thesis about what didn't happen. The one place you will find a lot of negative results studies in in clinical trials, where the results are necessarily going to be reported about anything that happened, positive or negative.