I can see why journals would not want to publish boring papers in the days of paper magazines and limited space but why would they not be published digitally nowadays? Limited by people able to review them?
No reason, I suppose. In my opinion it seems to just be a holdover from the previous systems of publishing. The prestige of a journal is ranked based on how often it gets cited (or in other words, how influential the papers are within the journal). Publishing insignificant/uninteresting data would lower a journal’s average citation count, which would make it seem less prestigious than other journals. Hence journals are incentivized to only publish interesting data. It’s a shitty system that everyone knows is shitty but nobody has a good solution for how to fix it
The prestige of a journal is ranked based on how often it gets cited (or in other words, how influential the papers are within the journal).
Wouldn’t this mean that other smaller journals could still publish the random common boring studies and then pretty much everyone would be citing those, since the boring stuff like “Trees consume carbon dioxide” would be cited a lot more than specific stuff like “Molecule XX2 can affect the brain development of Augustus caesarius if introduced between the ages of 3 and 6 months” and than become super prestigious?
A broad statement like “trees consume carbon dioxide” would actually be an incredible paper to publish because it means that there is 1. a lot of interesting data that could back up a statement so broad and 2. extremely applicable to a wide variety of fields. When I say “uninteresting,” I really mean a very specific type of uninteresting, like "sunlight does not affect the growth of the fungus Neurospora crassa. " It’s uninteresting because it doesn’t really tell us what affects the growth of the fungus, only that sunlight does not. If you got this result, you likely wouldn’t even feel like it’s information that’s worth making public, hence the lack of papers that have these sorts of results. But, if it weren’t published, then grad students across the globe would keep testing sunlight and keep finding the same thing again and again, wasting time and money. Hence the argument that all data should be published, regardless of how useless the results are
I can see why journals would not want to publish boring papers in the days of paper magazines and limited space but why would they not be published digitally nowadays? Limited by people able to review them?
No reason, I suppose. In my opinion it seems to just be a holdover from the previous systems of publishing. The prestige of a journal is ranked based on how often it gets cited (or in other words, how influential the papers are within the journal). Publishing insignificant/uninteresting data would lower a journal’s average citation count, which would make it seem less prestigious than other journals. Hence journals are incentivized to only publish interesting data. It’s a shitty system that everyone knows is shitty but nobody has a good solution for how to fix it
Wouldn’t this mean that other smaller journals could still publish the random common boring studies and then pretty much everyone would be citing those, since the boring stuff like “Trees consume carbon dioxide” would be cited a lot more than specific stuff like “Molecule XX2 can affect the brain development of Augustus caesarius if introduced between the ages of 3 and 6 months” and than become super prestigious?
A broad statement like “trees consume carbon dioxide” would actually be an incredible paper to publish because it means that there is 1. a lot of interesting data that could back up a statement so broad and 2. extremely applicable to a wide variety of fields. When I say “uninteresting,” I really mean a very specific type of uninteresting, like "sunlight does not affect the growth of the fungus Neurospora crassa. " It’s uninteresting because it doesn’t really tell us what affects the growth of the fungus, only that sunlight does not. If you got this result, you likely wouldn’t even feel like it’s information that’s worth making public, hence the lack of papers that have these sorts of results. But, if it weren’t published, then grad students across the globe would keep testing sunlight and keep finding the same thing again and again, wasting time and money. Hence the argument that all data should be published, regardless of how useless the results are