[gaiaseyes]

You've made a good point, and one that often arises in research. I've just finished my PhD in microbiology over the summer and am in a post-doc now. I cannot tell you the number of experiments I've done that yielded negative data (showing a hypothesis is false but not proving a counter hypothesis) that I could have avoided if other researchers had been able to publish their previous negative data.

I've never heard of that journal. You have to be careful in scientific publishing. There are a lot of very good, respected journals and then there are ones like this that will accept essentially any paper, without peer review (sending the article out to a panel of other experts to determine the validity of the data). Where you publish, even if it is a low impact journal, is as important as what you publish.

The other problem with publishing negative data is that there's already so many papers in a given field that its already extremely difficult for a researcher to read and keep up with them all. If you start adding negative data papers to that pile I think it would become utterly impossible to keep up with it.

[jonlucc]

It may be impossible to keep up with much of the negative research, but it would save you time if you could look for very specific results. It might be that you would only keep up on the negative data for a very narrow pathway or from a small set of labs. Doing that kind of research could save a lot of time and money.

Unfortunately, if those data are of such narrow use, there may be problems with publication. Firstly, no journal of negative data would ever gain any impact. Next, it might not be worth the time and effort to put together the paper. Maybe it would become sort of a right of passage for the newest student in a lab, which could have it's own benefits.

[gaiaseyes]

You've hit the nail on the head. The journal's impact factor would be pitifully low. But you're quite correct that having the information available would save a great deal of time and money (and blood, sweat, tears, grief and anxiety).

The ability to publish negative results would be tremendously useful for doctoral students. I mean, a tremendous amount of science is negative results and nothing about dissertation research guarantees that your hypothesis will be proven by your data. This would ease a lot of the angst caused by publication requirements for doctoral students and would give them phenomenal writing practice on fairly low stress publications. There's merit here, without a doubt, but it doesn't fit in to the established hierarchy of academic research which is a massive issue. I'm a firm believer is reform of academic research, but that's an entirely different discussion...

[sgt101]

Perhaps a different standard of publication would be required. It should be very easy to create a negative result publication, but the real kudos should accrue to people who repeat a negative result that has great value to those who subsequently avoid the result if you see what I mean. So, initially "this is negative" then "are we really sure it's negative" followed by "it's really negative, we all agree, well done to us" or something like that.