It’s time for positive action on negative results | March 7, 2016 Issue - Vol. 94 Issue 10 | Chemical & Engineering News

"Publish or perish. The reality of research is not as brutal as this infamous dictum might suggest. But even though your life may not be at stake, your livelihood probably is if you don’t comply with the norms of the scientific world. It is reasonable to expect researchers to produce papers. Yet, as the audit culture that has flooded many areas of human activity soaks into the fabric of academia, researchers are increasingly immersed in the metric tide. Papers have come to mean accumulating points: impact factors, citation counts, h indexes, and university league table rankings. We now find ourselves subjugated to a system of incentives that is inefficiently geared toward the engine of discovery and communication. Let’s face it, the publication system is misfiring. No one intended for things to turn out this way. But there is a widespread sense that we have gotten lost. When that happens, it is sensible to pause and take stock.  What is the purpose of a research publication? For sure it is to claim priority and demonstrate originality. We should not be squeamish about the egocentric forces at play here. Publishing also serves, ideally, to map out the territory of our understanding and to inform others so that guided by earlier findings we might penetrate deeper in subsequent forays.  The researchers with the biggest discoveries, however, win the most space in journals, which are keen to burnish their reputations as the repositories of great scientific advances. The reports of those who return empty-handed from the lab, however smart or well-crafted the experiment, rarely make it to the pages of the scientific literature.  And that’s a problem. It creates a publication bias that fills the literature with positive findings by systematically excluding negative results. No one likes negative results or seeks them out, regardless of what science philosopher Karl Popper has told us about the value of falsifying hypotheses rather than proving them ..."