Dr. Felix Eggers‘ comment on my last post did remind me of something! In August 2006, Felix, Michael Paul and I were attending the AMA Summer Marketing Educators’ Conference in Chicago. All of us where in the middle of our Ph.D. theses back then, with Magdas, Shirleys and Bernies popping up left and right. Sitting at the Chicago waterfront, we wondered where we could ever publish all of our failed studies. The ingenious solution: We needed to start our own journal, aptly named The Journal of Failed Studies.

Come to think of it, it’s really not such a bad idea. Replication is one of the cornerstones of empirical research. If a study fails to replicate a previous result, or fails to confirm what theoretically should have worked, other researchers should know – assuming that your study didn’t simply fail because of sloppiness. Or maybe even then it would be useful to know which potential mistakes to look out for. However, as all researchers know, journal editors prefer to publish unusual or even counterintuitive results over failed studies (and who’d want to fault them for it) – resulting in the so-called “file drawer problem” or publication bias.

Maybe we’ll pull our Journal of Failed Studies idea out of the file drawer sometime. Here’s what Michael and Felix say about it:

“The Journal of Failed Studies?”

“Why not! Tee-hee!”