SCIENCE MAKES MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

by Dawn Fallik

The science world is suddenly all excited about nothing.

After decades of shelving studies with negative results, researchers around the nation are agog about not one, but two new journals that focus only on studies that demonstrate what doesn’t work.

Researchers say they think the new journals will accomplish two goals: They will save taxpayers from paying for duplicate studies, and they will help scientists learn from one another’s mistakes.

Of course, these aren’t necessarily mistakes. Sometimes, proving a negative can have positive results.

“I think these studies ought to be published so it’s clear that certain things have been tried and done, and they haven’t worked,” said Dr. Bjorn Olsen, creator of the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine and chairman of the department of oral biology at Harvard School of Dental Medicine.

Olsen [published] the first volume of his online journal this summer through BioMed Central, a well-respected online publisher of peer-reviewed journals. The other journal, the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis, which focuses more on psychological studies, appeared online last month.

Major scientific journals such as Science and the New England Journal of Medicine usually publish studies with positive results that support the researcher’s hypothesis, such as pill X was shown to be effective to combat cancer Y.

Established journals tend to avoid studies that have negative results because other scientists can’t build directly on that research and see them as a dead end, said Monica Bradford, executive editor of Science.

But Bradford said she could see some value in such studies for those just starting their research and trying to see what has already been done.

Scott Kern is professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University and editor of the Journal of Negative Observations in Genetic Oncology, which he started in 1997. The response to that negative journal has been overwhelmingly positive, he said.

Kern’s journal focuses on gene-mutation studies and cancer. His hope is to stop scientists from performing the same study over and over again, simply because they don’t know it has been done before because it never got published in a traditional journal.

“Potentially, the savings are huge for the taxpayer who has to pay for all this,” he said. “There’s no way to estimate how many times an experiment has been done twice.”

The Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis is not only drawing attention because of its subject matter, but because of its editor’s age. Stephen Reysen, 21, studies psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The senior started the journal after his brother Matt, a doctoral student at Purdue University, complained that good studies never saw the light of day because of negative results.

Although most journal editors have a deciding role on what goes in the volume, Reysen said he’s just the organizer. The editorial board, which is made up of 10 people, eight of whom have doctoral degrees, reviews the submissions.

“I don’t analyze the articles,” Reysen said. “I get the articles in, and I figure out what area it’s in. I send it out to the three other people who are in that area of expertise, and they tell me whether it’s good or not.” He added that he may turn the journal over soon to an editor who has a doctorate.

Jeffrey Drazen, editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, said he’s not discounting Reysen’s journal based on age—but he wants to make sure the studies are valid. “I’ve learned never to judge a product by whom it’s from,” he said.

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Dawn Fallik is a reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.“Science makes much ado about nothing,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aug. 2, 2002. Reprinted with permission.

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