About Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine

What is Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine?

Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal that promotes a discussion of unexpected, controversial, provocative and/or negative results in the context of current tenets.

Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine aims to encourage scientists and physicians of all fields to publish results that challenge current models, tenets or dogmas. The journal invites scientists and physicians to submit work that illustrates how commonly used methods and techniques are unsuitable for studying a particular phenomenon. Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine strongly promotes and invites the publication of clinical trials that fall short of demonstrating an improvement over current treatments. The aim of the journal is to provide scientists and physicians with responsible and balanced information in order to improve experimental designs and clinical decisions.

Articles published in traditional journals frequently provide insufficient evidence regarding negative data. They hardly allow a rigorous evaluation of the quality of these results. In addition, controversial results that refute a current model or simply negative results within a current dogma, frequently meet considerable resistance before they are acknowledged. This is particularly the case if current techniques and technologies are too crude to shed further light on the findings. As more sophisticated techniques become available such findings may turn out to have been groundbreaking only decades later.

Not every unexpected observation, controversial conclusion or proposed model will turn out to be of such groundbreaking significance. Nor will they even be confirmed by subsequent scientific progress. However, we strongly believe that such "negative" observations and conclusions, based on rigorous experimentation and thorough documentation, ought to be published in order to be discussed, confirmed or refuted by others. In addition, publishing well documented failures may reveal fundamental flaws and obstacles in commonly used methods, drugs or reagents such as antibodies or cell lines, ultimately leading to improvements in experimental designs and clinical decisions.

Content overview

Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine considers the following types of articles:

• Research - reports of data from original research, in which the conclusions represent a major advance in understanding an important issue, with immediate, far-reaching implications.
• Short reports - brief reports of data from original research, focused on initial findings that will be of interest to scientists in other fields.
• Mini reviews -brief discussions of sharply focused topics of controversy or difficulty in a field of biomedicine. Mini reviews should direct readers to a few key papers in the field.
• Commentaries - short, decisive observations and findings that are controversial in a field of biomedicine. These articles are usually related to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings, but can also include the discussion of difficulties and possible solutions in a field of research.

Peer review policies

• Submitted articles will generally be reviewed by two external experts.
• Peer reviewers will have four possible options, for each article:
• accept without revision
• accept after revision without expecting to check those revisions
• neither accept nor reject until author(s) make revisions
• resubmit or reject because scientifically unsound.
• In the absence of compelling reasons to reject, Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine advises that reviewers recommend acceptance, as ultimately the scientific community will judge the quality of an article after its publication.
• When asking for revisions, reviewers have two possible goals: to ask authors to tighten their arguments based on existing data or to identify areas where more data are needed.
• Peer reviewers are asked to indicate which articles they consider to be especially interesting or significant. These articles will be given greater prominence within Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine and greater external publicity.

Edited by Bjorn R Olsen, Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine

All articles will be listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and will be covered by PubMed Central, MEDLINE and Embase.

Articles in Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

J Negat Results BioMed 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine is published  by BioMed Central, an independent publisher committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is Open Access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also in repositories at the University of Potsdam in Germany, at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

BioMed Central is working closely with the Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine will be available.

Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.