[LINK] "Psychologists Throw Open The “File Drawer”"
Discover's Neuroskeptic blogs about a team of psychologists who are starting to publish papers showing negative findings, to help overcome publication bias.
The ‘file drawer problem’ refers to the fact that in science, many results remain unpublished - especially negative ones. This is a problem because it produces publication bias.
Now, a group of Belgian psychology researchers have decided to make a stand. In a bold move against publication bias, they’ve thrown open their own file drawer. In the new paper, Anthony Lane and colleagues from the Université catholique de Louvain say that they’ve realized that over the years, “our publication portfolio has become less and less representative of our actual findings”. Therefore, they “decided to get these [unpublished] studies out of our drawer and encourage other laboratories to do the same.”
Lane et al.’s research focus is oxytocin, the much-discussed “love hormone”. Their lab has published a number of papers reporting that an intranasal spray of oxytocin alters human behaviour. But they now reveal that they also tried to publish numerous negative findings, yet these null results remain in the file drawer because they weren’t accepted for publication.
Is there a file drawer problem in intranasal oxytocin research? If this is the case, it may also be the case in our laboratory. This paper aims to answer that question, document the extent of the problem, and discuss its implications for intranasal oxytocin research. We present eight studies (including 13 dependent variables overall, assessed through 25 different paradigms) that were performed in our lab from 2009 until 2014 on a total of 453 subjects…
As we will demonstrate below, the results were too often not those expected. Only four studies (most often a part of them) of the eight were submitted for publication, yielding five articles (2, 8, 27, 34, 35). Of these five articles, only one (27) reports a null-finding. We submitted several studies yielding null-findings to different journals (from general interest in psychology to specialized in biological psychology and in psychoenodcrinology) but they were rejected time and time again.
The ‘file drawer problem’ refers to the fact that in science, many results remain unpublished - especially negative ones. This is a problem because it produces publication bias.
Now, a group of Belgian psychology researchers have decided to make a stand. In a bold move against publication bias, they’ve thrown open their own file drawer. In the new paper, Anthony Lane and colleagues from the Université catholique de Louvain say that they’ve realized that over the years, “our publication portfolio has become less and less representative of our actual findings”. Therefore, they “decided to get these [unpublished] studies out of our drawer and encourage other laboratories to do the same.”
Lane et al.’s research focus is oxytocin, the much-discussed “love hormone”. Their lab has published a number of papers reporting that an intranasal spray of oxytocin alters human behaviour. But they now reveal that they also tried to publish numerous negative findings, yet these null results remain in the file drawer because they weren’t accepted for publication.
Is there a file drawer problem in intranasal oxytocin research? If this is the case, it may also be the case in our laboratory. This paper aims to answer that question, document the extent of the problem, and discuss its implications for intranasal oxytocin research. We present eight studies (including 13 dependent variables overall, assessed through 25 different paradigms) that were performed in our lab from 2009 until 2014 on a total of 453 subjects…
As we will demonstrate below, the results were too often not those expected. Only four studies (most often a part of them) of the eight were submitted for publication, yielding five articles (2, 8, 27, 34, 35). Of these five articles, only one (27) reports a null-finding. We submitted several studies yielding null-findings to different journals (from general interest in psychology to specialized in biological psychology and in psychoenodcrinology) but they were rejected time and time again.