Welcome to the Forum for Negative Results (FNR),

a part of the Journal of Universal Computer Science

The "Forum for Negative Results", established 1997, is a permanent special section of the Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS), one of the oldest peer-reviewed electronic journals (started in 1994 by Springer Verlag).

Features:

• J.UCS is a high-quality, peer-reviewed, archival scientific journal, covering all areas of Computer Science, Information Systems, and Software Engineering.
• It is published monthly in electronic form by a worldwide consortium of universities under an Open Access policy; paper copies of complete volumes are also available.
• J.UCS articles, once published, are guaranteed to remain unchanged. However, there are refereed annotations for providing updates by the author or comments by others.
• FNR is a regular part of J.UCS and enjoys all of its advantages.
• FNR publishes reports on high-quality, negative research results in all practical areas of Computer Science.

Important pointers

• FNR call for papers
• The FNR foundation paper "Why We Need an Explicit Forum for Negative Results" explains the idea and rationale in more detail.

• J.UCS homepage
• How to submit to FNR

Venues specialized on publishing negative results

• Biology/Medicine
  • Journal of Errology (since 2011; "a journal for your stumbles")
  • All Results Journal: Biol (since 2010; "articles based on original research that are judged, after editorial review, to make a novel contribution with negative results in Biology")
  • Journal of Negative Results – Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (since 2004; "will include studies that 1) test novel or established hypotheses/theories that yield negative or dissenting results, or 2) replicate work published previously (in either cognate or different systems)")
  • Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine (JNRBM, since 2002; "promotes a discussion of unexpected, controversial, provocative and/or negative results")
  • Negative Observations in Genetic Oncology (NOGO, 1997 to ca. 2008, apparently defunct; latest copy in the Wayback Machine)
• Physics/Chemistry
  • All Results Journal: Chem (since 2010; "focuses on recovering and publishing those experiments that either failed or led to 'unexpected' results within all areas of Chemistry")
  • All Results Journal: Nano (since 2010; "focuses on recovering and publishing negative results in Nanotechnology")
  • All Results Journal: Phys (since 2010; "focuses on recovering and publishing experiments with negative results in Physics")
• Psychology
  • Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis (JASNH, since 2002; "an outlet for experiments that do not reach the traditional significance levels (p < .05)")
• Social Sciences
  • Journal of Spurious Correlations (since 2005; mostly for methodology discussion)
• Computer Science
  • Journal of Interesting Negative Results in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning (JINR, since 2008)
  • Journal of Negative Results in Speech and Audio Sciences (since 2003; possibly defunct: website has a permanent database error as of 2012-01)
  • Forum for Negative Results (since 1997; for unexpected non-successes that can now be explained)
• Mathematics
  • Rejecta Mathematica (since 2009; motto: "Caveat emptor", accepts only material that has been rejected in peer-review elsewhere)
• Diverse Fields
  • Journal of Null Results (empty as of 2012-01)
  • Journal of Null Results (another, since 2010; empty as of 2012-01)
  • Journal of Unsolved Questions (since 2011; for incomplete studies)

Please tell me if you find something else that should be in the above list.

Venues _also_ publishing negative results

Unlike the ones above, these venues are not specialized towards negative results and do not publish only those. Rather, they accept negative results among other things and explicitly say so.

There are too many such venues among the specialized journals in many disciplines to list them all, so we only mention a few with broad topic range.

• PeerJ
• PLOS ONE

Other things

• part of a discussion on sci.psychology.research on the issue of a forum for psychological null results
• the page of 'MIS Quarterly' on the issue of reviewing
• an article on reviewing, the scientific method, and negative results in The Economist, September 27th, 1997: Science and Technology: Methodical Progress. Applying the scientific method to the processes of science can be illuminating
• The german edition of Technology Review has an article "Negativ denken" ("Thinking negatively") about the publication of negative results in its March 2007 issue.
• Are Null Results Becoming an Endangered Species in Marketing? (1992)
• Publication Bias in Medical Informatics (editorial of the Journal of the American Medial Informatics Association in an issue containing the only two publishable papers received as the result of a call for negative results)
• The Skeptic's Dictionary: positive-outcome (publication) bias (includes a reading list with hyperlinks)
• Google search on "file drawer problem"

How to submit to FNR

For submitting a paper for publication in the Forum for Negative Results,

• just follow the guidelines given in "How to submit to J.UCS"
• and give your paper an additional subtitle, namely "A contribution to the Forum for Negative Results".
• The paper will undergo the normal J.UCS reviewing and publication process, except that the FNR review criteria as described in the FNR call for papers will be applied as a complement to the normal J.UCS criteria.

---

Lutz Prechelt prechelt@inf.fu-berlin.de
Last modified: Wed Oct 30 18:19:06 W. Europe Standard Time 2013