Journals can be groundbreaking or definitive, not both
I was recently invited to contribute to Personality and Social Psychology Connections, an online journal of commentary (read: fancy blog) run by SPSP. Don Forsyth is the editor, and the contributors include David Dunning, Harry Reis, Jennifer Crocker, Shige Oishi, Mark Leary, and Scott Allison. My inaugural post is titled “Groundbreaking or definitive? Journals need to pick one.” Excerpt:
Do our top journals need to rethink their missions of publishing research that is both groundbreaking and definitive? And as a part of that, do they — and we scientists — need to reconsider how we engage with the press and the public?…
In some key ways groundbreaking is the opposite of definitive. There is a lot of hard work to be done between scooping that first shovelful of dirt and completing a stable foundation. And the same goes for science (with the crucial difference that in science, you’re much more likely to discover along the way that you’ve started digging on a site that’s impossible to build on). “Definitive” means that there is a sufficient body of evidence to accept some conclusion with a high degree of confidence. And by the time that body of evidence builds up, the idea is no longer groundbreaking.
