New journals for cumulative psychological science
Even when empirical papers report multiple studies, it is rarely possible to be certain that findings extend beyond the specific contexts examined. Nevertheless, many journals expect empirical articles to claim that their findings should apply more broadly. This expectation is often unrealistic and incentivizes overconfident claims. One possible solution is a publication outlet for reporting studies as demonstrations that a phenomenon of interest can occur, or does not occur, in a well-specified context, without making claims beyond the contexts. This would be paired with a crowd-sourced indexing system to facilitate curation and synthesis of findings, as well as a journal (or journals) dedicated to publishing “living documents” that continuously integrate results across multiple studies and seek to identify boundary conditions with increasing precision. In this hackathon, we will work together to identify key hurdles such a publication model may face and brainstorm solutions to address them.