Prompt: People don’t tend to publish negative results. What problems does this lead to?

Negative results can be of great value. Disproving predictions and theories can help direct the focus of a research project and eliminate “false” possibilities. When journals choose not to publish negative results, a number of different issues arise.

Firstly, there is a cost in time and resources. When important negative results are withheld, every scientists researching the specific area will need to conduct an experiment on his own to obtain the information. These funds and the time and effort of the researchers could be put to use in other ways if important negative results were accessible through the literature.

There are also consequences for the group producing the results. If their data is not publishable, despite stemming from high quality research, the group might experience difficulties in acquiring additional funding.

The absence of negative results in scientific literature also has an impact on the literature itself.

New pieces of seemingly plausible and coherent data might be contradicted by previous studies, but perhaps these studies were never published because the results were negative. This way it becomes increasingly difficult to identify “false positives”.

A related, but more general issue is the imbalance created in literature when it only represents a fraction of the research – the fraction that yielded positive results. The published information shapes our current understanding of research fields, and these views and paradigms serve as framework for assessing data quality and selecting future publications.

Data is more likely to be published if it is coherent (compatible with the current knowledge). If our general understanding is not representative of all the research conducted around the world, then future publications will not be either. This creates an imbalance in literature, strengthening certain paradigms and rejecting others. Needless to say, this is not optimal for a learning community.