Economics journal only publishes results that are no big deal

I think you're right about the root cause; that's why Plaudit's endorsement data is free and open data, publicly available through CrossRef. Citations indeed are a similar implicit voting system, but they have the "problem" that they only accumulate over a larger time scale: an article first has to undergo peer review, then get published, then get read, then get used, and then people using it also need to get their results reviewed and published. We're talking several years here.

That's why evaluators often use the journal name/Impact Factor as a proxy for "expected number of citations". With Plaudit, research can start accumulating endorsements from the moment the preprint is published, so it could serve a similar role.

(And since Plaudit endorsements judge impact and robustness separately, articles and the journals that publish them can also get recognition for "boring" research - which is not possible using the Impact Factor.

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Luckily, there are also plenty of initiatives for alternative public peer review systems. Additionally, there are also tons of "blockchain for science" projects (caveat: most appear to consist of a single whitepaper), although it's not clear to me what science-specific problem the decentralisation solves.

If you'd like some pointers to some specific such projects, let me know.

I'm not sure this is even true in theory. The decision to cite something looks to me to be more about relevance than quality. Citing a paper says, "they investigated a related question," rather than "their investigation was especially rigorous/thorough."

Encouraging journals to publish more "boring" research, and if need be, dedicated journals, can have an actual impact.

Only if tenure committees and funding agencies consider the "boring" research sufficiently important.

In other words: I don't think limited publication venues is the reason few negative results get published. [1]

But absolutely, it should be normalised. I also do think preregistration would be an effective tool in making that happen, if funders start requiring it - which is a challenge in its own right.

[1] I think this summarises my views best, so I'm adding this to my original comment as well.

I'm interested in how often some interest group pays for p-hacked results so that they can use it to strengthen their position in some way?

In my opinion, it's very hard to have good science whenever there is external money in the picture. The temptation/pressure to slightly tweak the variables or scope of the study to achieve a desired outcome for the benefactor is just too high.

The worst part is that this allows people to strengthen their biases by cherry picking "scientific studies" that seem to agree with their position even if intuitively something doesn't seem right. And science is the highest authority you can appeal to, so there is no way to refute it short of funding your own, better study that arrives at the opposite conclusion.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/

It does a pretty good job of illustrating why investigating the rigor of the methodology is as important as the statistical results.

The military wanted to conduct an experiment to see if urban or rural recruits would have an easier time matriculating. They felt the hypothesis was obvious: rural recruits would be more “rugged” and handle extreme environments better.

The experiment showed the opposite—urban recruits were matriculating better. Suddenly the conclusion was “obvious” as well: urban recruits were more accustomed to rigid lifestyles and could handle the orders barked at them.

The lesson is that if two opposite results could be “obvious” then neither are. Observational studies can very easily fall into this trap.

It does not fix that because, as GP mentioned, researchers are incentivised to publish in prestigious journals, which this journal won't become. Thus, negative results still won't get published.

We don't (or shouldn't) trust in cases of major conflicts of interest. Being caught taking bribes to influence results would be a black list worthy move but institutions of all sorts effectively do the same thing with more indirection accidentally or otherwise.

Regardless of aims pushes can create bad science. Behind many private testing scandal was a blind push to improve throughput and expenses with no regards to accuracy.

I definitely don't have an answer to how to restructure it better - much less a way that is practical or able to get any political acceptance.

Researchers trying to score points aim to be published by these.

This gives them incentives to try new stuff, disregard boring results (like negative results) and for those inclined, to cheat.

These tend to push the journal profile, at least until something like the replication crisis.

It’s a positive feedback loop in all it’s glory