How can someone with this type of research get published??

[ToldYouSo]

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To claim it's a soft science is debatable.

I respectfully disagree. Look at some of the articles in the highest impact factor journal in each field. The reason it's so hard to perform a good and meaningful psychological experiment is because it's much more subjective and subject to hand-waving and spin doctoring than the natural sciences whose assertions are more testable. Not surprisingly, over 90% of psych papers have a positive result supporting whatever hypothesis they're testing, the most out of any other field.* I wonder what the state of psych would be today without the MRI or other brain imaging tools based on the fundamental theories laid out by physicists.


I could probably gather all the responses to this thread, make a nice graph and publish a psych paper on "College student perceptions on the nature of psychology as a hard vs. soft science"


* http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20383332

 

[Doctor Strange]

If there's a will, there's a way. You'd be surprised how easy it is for you to get something published. You just have to find a journal that's obscure enough.

 

[circulus vitios]

If there's a will, there's a way. You'd be surprised how easy it is for you to get something published. You just have to find a journal that's obscure enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_Publishing

In 2012, one of its journals, Advances in Pure Mathematics, accepted a paper written by a random text generator. However, the paper was not published, due to its author's inability to pay the $500 peer-review fee.

http://thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/

Funny it still happens even in math journals, although I'm sure it's much more common in all soft science journals.

 

[Stumpyman]

Social science is the proper term. Similarly to how Biology is a Life Science as oppose to Physics or Chemistry which are Physical Sciences.

To claim it's a soft science is debatable.

Hm, my apologies. I knew it's a social science, but I also thought it was a fact that it's a "soft" science, although I guess that can be debated.

 

[TriagePreMed]

That was what the "idk tho" was for.

I actually did look up the IF before i posted that, its around 4. Is that terrible? No terrible is around 2 (lol im looking at you Current Genetics). Does it technically add to the scientific data bank? Yes. But seriously man look at the study that was published in that magazine. You will never see something like that in a quality journal.

And yes i do work in research thank you very much. First time I have heard of PLoS, as I usually only deal with Nature, Science, and JBC (that was a joke)

Psychology in general is piss poor. Even the top journals in social psychology are pretty much as useless, but even then, I've seen some sketchy articles (albeit rare in comparison to PLoS-One) come out of nature and science. Wasn't there a study recently that only about 60% of the experiments there could be reproduced?

 

[Doudline]

Psychology in general is piss poor. Even the top journals in social psychology are pretty much as useless, but even then, I've seen some sketchy articles (albeit rare in comparison to PLoS-One) come out of nature and science. Wasn't there a study recently that only about 60% of the experiments there could be reproduced?

No, it's 60% of the experiments that could NOT be reproduced whatsoever.

 

[SpecterGT260]

MelissaThompson is... correct.


"All submissions go through an internal and external pre-publication peer review but are not excluded on the basis of lack of perceived importance or adherence to a scientific field."




idk tho, it also says some nobel laureates published in it

There is a PT/PhD at the nursing college here that keeps publishing nonsense about gender differences in pain and things of that nature. The impact factors of her papers are somewhere in the <1 range, and her models and experimental methods are honestly nearly 90* to the left of her conclusions. As in... she wasn't even able to identify the right path and then mistakenly go the wrong direction, she is just wandering around aimlessly. But there is always someone who will take your crap if you want to publish it. plosone is kinda the caribbean of journals.

 

[ranson]

The article should not have been published because an average 5 year old could come up with the study. Anyways, psychology is a soft science so I a not surprised that garbage like this got published.

 

[mehc012]

The article should not have been published because an average 5 year old could come up with the study. Anyways, psychology is a soft science so I a not surprised that garbage like this got published.

That's not really the point, though. The purpose of carrying out the experiment was to obtain a concrete answer to something that we all just shrug at and think we intuitively know the answers to.

Now we have solid evidence that human females find brown eyes more trustworthy. That is a usable statement. Before, we could have said "we think that brown eyes would be considered more trustworthy" or "I find brown eyes more trustworthy", but it would have been solely conjecture. Now, is this something that will be useful in the future? Maybe, probably just as much as the factoid that "symmetry" is attractive.

Science should always strive to provide solid evidence for statements generally assumed to be true, and while this study is not useful on its own, there's no guarantee that some later researcher won't stumble upon it and think "this is just what I was looking for" and include it in something more applicable.

As for your claim that 'A five-year old could have come up with this study'...yeah, that may be true, but these people actually got approval, carried it out, and got results. There are plenty of groundbreaking studies that you can look at and think "hey, a kid could do that" (heavier objects don't fall faster, anyone?) but publications aren't awarded by who could have done them, just who did. First.

Furthermore, PLoS is a journal set up SPECIFICALLY to publish results which are currently non-publishable due to a lack of impact. This is actually hugely important, because our current, impact-based system of publishing, is profoundly flawed.

For example, negative results don't do anything themselves, and so don't get published. But think of it this way: one researcher tries 16 different ways to achieve a goal, and all of them fail. He can't publish negative results, so he moves on.

The next researcher in the field comes up with ~12 different things to try, but 10 of them have already been tested by researcher A, and we know they won't work. This goes on worldwide, with countless postdocs laboring away at efforts which, if impactless negative results were published somewhere, they would already know were futile. This is SUCH an enormous waste of manpower, resources, and creativity that it is not even funny.

In the case of medical trials, it can move from 'not funny' to 'deadly'.
Look up Ben Goldacre's TED talks on bad science.

TL;DR
Simplicity does not make an experiment worthless
We SHOULD be collecting evidence on basic assumptions
PLoS is not a 'crap' journal
Impact-less studies, especially negative results, REALLY NEED be published, and PLoS is trying to make that happen.

 

[HughMyron]

Sigh...I've just about had it with the SDN consensus that any research outside Medicine and the "Hard Sciences" is useless. Just because some research doesn't result in new surgical techniques doesn't mean that it is useless. Even if it doesn't result in any tangible advance, it's worth it just to find out more about something. Cause who knows where that might lead?

Restriction Enzymes are invaluable to Bioengineering, but nobody would have found out about them if we hadn't looked at viral infection of bacteria.

 

[OCDOCDOCD]

There is a PT/PhD at the nursing college here that keeps publishing nonsense about gender differences in pain and things of that nature. The impact factors of her papers are somewhere in the <1 range, and her models and experimental methods are honestly nearly 90* to the left of her conclusions. As in... she wasn't even able to identify the right path and then mistakenly go the wrong direction, she is just wandering around aimlessly. But there is always someone who will take your crap if you want to publish it. plosone is kinda the caribbean of journals.

While PLoS One doesn't have high standards for articles, it nonetheless has wound up with a large number of very good research articles. There have actually been studies done on why PLoS One's caliber of published research is as good as it is considering how lax the journal is, and the conclusions have been that a lot of big names publish in it just for principle (open access for all) and that the fact that you have to pay a pretty hefty amount of money to publish in it keeps out a lot of bad PIs who don't have the funding necessary to cover the costs of publishing in an open journal.

 

[SpecterGT260]

While PLoS One doesn't have high standards for articles, it nonetheless has wound up with a large number of very good research articles. There have actually been studies done on why PLoS One's caliber of published research is as good as it is considering how lax the journal is, and the conclusions have been that a lot of big names publish in it just for principle (open access for all) and that the fact that you have to pay a pretty hefty amount of money to publish in it keeps out a lot of bad PIs who don't have the funding necessary to cover the costs of publishing in an open journal.

That's true. It has some decent stuff. It is also the largest journal in existence now I think.... You just need to be a little more discriminatory when reading their stuff.