[_delirium]

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-scale study failing to find a result for something that many other people have claimed should exist, e.g. power-line cancer studies. But if it isn't in that category, it's harder. The fundamental problem is that nobody wants thousands of paper saying "X doesn't cure cancer. X2 also doesn't. X3, once again, does not cure cancer", because the vast majority of Xs don't do Y.