Three studies that have summarised different aspects of the marketing science literature are used to examine whether the discipline is paying enough attention to its empirical foundations. Recommendations are made about encouraging the publication of more studies that use strong competing hypotheses rather than dominant hypotheses, studies that involve replication and extensions, and studies that use exploratory data analysis. Recommendations are also made about the more detailed reporting of results about model validation and not always requiring statistically significant results when accepting papers for publication. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.