There’s controversy surrounding The Journal of Spurious Correlations, a new social-science journal devoted exclusively to publishing negative results. “Nobody likes our name,” says David Lehrer, a graduate student in comparative political economy at the University of Helsinki, who helped found the journal. “People say it’s a bit goofy, that it should be more serious.”

But no one questions the seriousness of its mission. Historically, scientific journals have published only positive results — data showing one thing connected to another (like smoking to cancer). As a rule, they didn’t publish negative results (this drug didn’t cure that disease). Medical journals began publishing negative results a few years ago, but social science didn’t follow the trend. This is a problem. Not publishing negative results means that generations of researchers can waste time and money repeating the same studies and finding the same unpublishable results.

Then there’s publication bias. If, for example, a study found that welfare states have more terrorism than nonwelfare states, it would probably get published. If eight studies didn’t find a connection between welfare and terrorism, they probably wouldn’t make it into print, because technically, they didn’t find anything. So a survey of published literature might suggest that welfare and terrorism are linked, even though eight studies potentially proved otherwise. This could have serious implications.

“Social-science research results lead to huge, important decisions,” Lehrer says, about free trade, for example, or government spending on weapons. “That should require total transparency.” But since no one publishes negative results, Lehrer says, those important decisions are sometimes based on biased information. And there are data supporting his theory: early this year, a study found that the leading political-science journals are “misleading and inaccurate due to publication bias.”