17
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Negative results: negative perceptions limit their potential for increasing reproducibility

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Negative results are an important building block in the development of scientific thought, primarily because most likely the vast majority of data is negative, i.e., there is not a favorable outcome. Only very limited data is positive, and that is what tends to get published, albeit alongside a sub-set of negative results to emphasize the positive nature of the positive results. Yet, not all negative results get published. Part of the problem lies with a traditional mind-set and rigid publishing frame-work that tends to view negative results in a negative light, or that only tends to reward scientists primarily for presenting positive findings. This opinion piece indicates that in addition to a deficient mind-set, there are also severe limitations in the availability of publishing channels where negative results could get published.

          Related collections

          Most cited references7

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: found
          Is Open Access

          Do Pressures to Publish Increase Scientists' Bias? An Empirical Support from US States Data

          The growing competition and “publish or perish” culture in academia might conflict with the objectivity and integrity of research, because it forces scientists to produce “publishable” results at all costs. Papers are less likely to be published and to be cited if they report “negative” results (results that fail to support the tested hypothesis). Therefore, if publication pressures increase scientific bias, the frequency of “positive” results in the literature should be higher in the more competitive and “productive” academic environments. This study verified this hypothesis by measuring the frequency of positive results in a large random sample of papers with a corresponding author based in the US. Across all disciplines, papers were more likely to support a tested hypothesis if their corresponding authors were working in states that, according to NSF data, produced more academic papers per capita. The size of this effect increased when controlling for state's per capita R&D expenditure and for study characteristics that previous research showed to correlate with the frequency of positive results, including discipline and methodology. Although the confounding effect of institutions' prestige could not be excluded (researchers in the more productive universities could be the most clever and successful in their experiments), these results support the hypothesis that competitive academic environments increase not only scientists' productivity but also their bias. The same phenomenon might be observed in other countries where academic competition and pressures to publish are high.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            The Negative Side of Positive Psychology

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Editorial: Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine

              Editorial Dear readers of the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, We are pleased to introduce you to the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine (JNRBM). A journal, very unique in its kind, as it publishes articles, fully PubMed indexed that challenge current models, tenets and dogmas. The articles are based on rigorous, and well documented results that do not support these models or even disprove them. It publishes methods and techniques that are found to be unsuitable for studying a particular phenomenon. JNRBM strongly promotes and encourages the publication of clinical trials that fall short of demonstrating an improvement over current treatments. JNRBM's immediate goal is to provide scientists and physicians with responsible and balanced information in order to improve experimental designs and clinical decisions. As we started this journal we received a large amount of positive feedback, as well as some critical comments and questions. Among them, why such a journal? What are the benefits of a journal that publishes negative results? Won't such published information give my competitors an advantage? How do you avoid publishing bad science? To respond to these concerns, we would like to draw the reader's attention to Karl Popper's realization that science advances through a process of "conjectures and refutations". Popper gave a rather compelling and simple example: For thousands of years Europeans believed that swans are white based on observations of millions of white swans, until exploration of Australasia introduced Europeans to black swans. Popper's point: Only one black swan was needed to repudiate the theory that all swans are white. However many confirming instances there are for a theory, it only takes one counter observation to falsify it. As compelling as Popper's arguments are, in reality however, scientists with controversial results, results that refute a current model or "negative" results struggle for their acknowledgement. Numerous examples of scientists can be given where these kind of findings went unnoticed or worse, were ridiculed, to only have their groundbreaking discoveries confirmed decades later. One such example is Gregor Mendel who painstakingly gathered data from hundreds of crosses of his pea plants and deduced what he called the First and Second Laws of Heredity. He further formulated a simple model by which these laws could operate and proposed that observed traits are determined by discrete "factors," now called genes. Mendel's work, presented to various authorities and societies in 1865–1867 was all but ignored by his colleagues and authorities because it challenged the contemporary theory of blending of inherited traits. Years later, copies of his manuscript were found unopened among the papers of some of his prominent colleagues. It was not until 1902, when Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak rediscovered the principles formulated by Mendel, that the branch of biology known as genetics was launched. Not every unexpected set of observations and controversial conclusion or proposed model will turn out to be of mendelian significance or even confirmed by subsequent scientific progress. However, we strongly believe that such observations and conclusions that are based on rigorous experimentation and thorough documentation, ought to be published in order to be discussed, confirmed or refuted by others. If in the end the "negative results" are the consequence of some fundamental flaw in methods that are commonly used, perhaps further analysis by others may help uncover those flaws and lead to a methodological improvement. If the "negative results" originate from deficiencies in reagents commonly used, or deficiencies that only emerge in a particular experimental situation, publication of such results may lead to a reassessment of the properties of such reagents. Common examples are the reassessment of antibody specificity, the origin of a cell line, or the sequence of a DNA probe. Finally, we believe it is useful and important to publish well documented failures, such as with drugs that show no benefit or clinical improvement, as well as with the use of methods that are unreliable but for which the shortcomings have not been publicized. Bjorn Olsen MD PhD Christian Pfeffer MD
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                jaimetex@yahoo.com
                Journal
                J Negat Results Biomed
                J Negat Results Biomed
                Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine
                BioMed Central (London )
                1477-5751
                7 July 2015
                7 July 2015
                2015
                : 14
                : 12
                Affiliations
                P.O. Box 7, Miki-cho Post Office, Ikenobe 3011-2, Kagawa-ken, 761-0799 Japan
                Article
                33
                10.1186/s12952-015-0033-9
                4494691
                26149259
                3c3e3f7c-48ca-4261-9a8a-390d7b60aeba
                © Teixeira da Silva. 2015

                This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

                History
                : 13 May 2015
                : 3 July 2015
                Categories
                Commentary
                Custom metadata
                © The Author(s) 2015

                Life sciences
                cope,editorial bias,negative results,stm publishers,traditional peer review
                Life sciences
                cope, editorial bias, negative results, stm publishers, traditional peer review

                Comments

                Comment on this article