A group of social scientists in Europe and the US has established a new journal of negative and unpublishable results in the social sciences.  The mission of The Journal of Spurious Correlations (JSpurC) is to provide a legitimate venue for exploring pure and applied methodological questions in the social sciences in the company of colleagues without fear of professional embarrassment or reprisal.  While a number of the present organizers are political scientists, such an initiative may be relevant to other social science disciplines as well, and to a range of methodological approaches beyond the ‘quantitative.’ 

Why establish The Journal of Spurious Correlations? 

     A tremendous amount of potentially useful information is currently lost to the social sciences through selective reporting of results.  The Journal of Spurious Correlations will represent the first systematic effort within the social sciences to address this very significant problem.

     Other fields are now developing initiatives like this, particularly in the ‘hard’ sciences.  Some of these are quite recent, but it may be only a matter of time before similar initiatives, in some format or other, appear in the social sciences.

     Airing and discussing researchers’ ‘mistakes’ could enhance quality control and community building in the disciplines of social science.

     An initiative such as this could also catalyze a (much-needed) wider discussion about the use of methods, about ‘What is spurious?’ in the social sciences, and about how scholarly disciplines should handle their ‘mistakes.’

     Such discussion could lead to greater dialogue across social science disciplines and across national borders on questions central to the vocation of social scientific research.

The Journal is an affiliated project to the Research Committee on Logic and Methodology of the International Sociology Association (ISA) and draws participating editors, advisory board members and contributors from around the world.