Publishing Negative Results

It's harder to publish negative results.

Often negative results are never published. Great post.

[PLUG] Some of what you mention are "negative results" that are quite prevelant and a necessary part of any research. However, the expected mold at publishing venues is such that they are not considered worthwhile.My colleagues and I are trying to address this by creating a platform to discuss and publish such "bad" or "negative" results. More info here:https://error-workshop.org

If you want to see the negative results, contact the researcher. There is no room, publishing mechanism, or benefit to most negative results. If the negative results are novel or reveal a new method, they will get published.Science doesn't care that someone tried hard. Science isn't about applauding effort but is about results. Negative results with significance may, very seldom, be worthy of publishing.Publishing the vast majority of negative results would be a waste of time, fu

For everyone who says “modern incentives forbid publishing negative results,” let this stand as a counterexample!

Publishing negative results is important to solving this issue.

Agreed.I wonder how many negative results get repeated because they don't get published. It could save a lot of effort and money publishing negative results.

You can publish negative results, but the bar is usually higher. It's easiest if you find some new "positive" reason for the negative result, so you can have a narrative along the lines of: you might think X would work, and here are all the reasons it's plausible, which we used to believe too, but it turns out it doesn't, because of Y.If you don't have a reason for the failure, just "hmm, didn't seem to work", you can still publish, but it's harder. The next-best case is if you have a large-s

If they hadn't published it, comments here on HN would probably complain how negative results are never published. You can't have it both ways, though.

Are you sure about that? Journals don't (in general) publish negative results. The result of the pressure to publish is not that negative results get published; it's that the scientist has an incentive to create positive results. Not necessarily through data falsification, but through choosing experiments very likely to generate "results", which, unfortunately, also implies that the information content of such experiments is necessarily lower than it could be if the scientist had more fre