www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

If it’s on here already somewhere, apologies. If not, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it and the relevance to the first paragraph.

On a more practical note, I don’t think the idea of publishing a lot of null findings is realistic anyway. No-one would read a journal of null findings because we just don’t have the time! Already now researchers struggle to keep up with their reading and have to carefully select which papers to read and which ones to put aside for later. A related problem is the strain it would put on the peer review system. Reviewing takes huge amounts of time, and a lot of journals have a hard time finding reviewers and getting them to return their comments in a reasonable time. If you flooded that limited resource with all the null results people have in their drawers, the entire enterprise of science might grind to a halt.

Impact factors have their problems, but one of the reasons why people care about them is that they are to some degree informative. If something gets published in a journal with a very high impact factor, I can be fairly certain that it’s going to be good, and worth reading (of course there are exceptions to this rule, lots of them). If a paper gets a large number of citations, that’s another sign for me that it’s likely to be important to read. If I make what I think is an important finding, I know it will be worth trying to send it to a top journal because I know everyone reads them. If papers weren’t reviewed partially based on their impact, a lot of really important work would be at risk of getting buried and going unnoticed in places like PLoS ONE (which is an example of a journal that doesn’t review for impact and therefore publishes a mixed bag of decent stuff and rubbish, making people less likely to pay attention to it).

All I’m saying is there is some benefit at least to the current state of affairs. Whether these benefits outweigh the negatives is a matter for debate of course.

The day that the academics stop judging journals based on impact factor is the day when publishers may consider publishing negative results. This will (presumably) also be the day on which funding organisations start allocating funding on merit rather than citations and where scientists have published. That will be a great day for science, and I hope it happens soon – but I won’t hold my breath as it means someone who actually understands the all of the science taking charge of the funding. Until then scientists are doomed to be forever repeating the mistakes made in the past but not published.

I give you www.jasnh.com – Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis

The issue is that anyone doing any research wants it to “succeed”. We need an approach that is more effective in eliminating the rosy spectacles.

That, unfortunately, is the beauty of it. It’s possible to be extremely creative while also being entirely accurate. It’s a little like the difference between ‘precision’ and ‘accuracy’: I am 8.00000ft tall is precise, but not remotely accurate.

Likewise, “…came in showing no signs of distress, trauma, confusion or pain, was not in need of immediate medical attention, is physically complete, stable and expected to make a full recovery” can be applied with technical accuracy to a freshly exhumed, scrubbed and boxed skeleton sat on a desk. (‘Complete’ is defined by context and you can ‘expect’ what you like!)

You could even add “seems unresponsive, sits grinning in silence” but that’s just fleshing it out.

I also do not entirely agree. However little the data may tell you, at the very minimum it tells you your hypothesis was incorrect. While that is often not enough for a publication in the established journals, your only other option is currently to publish it as a technical report, white paper or some other non-peer-reviewed channel which will probably never be read by anybody outside the institute where the research was done. That means that somebody else somewhere else might have the same idea and repeat all the research simply because he doesn’t know that was already tried: wasting the time and money on this negative result not once, but twice, or maybe many times.

I really think there’s a use for somehting like a Journal of Negative Results in which it’d be possible to publish your “not terribly interesting null results” without having to spin them. Obviously you’d still have to take the effort of explaining why your hypothesis was worth researching in the first place

I was going over work done by someone 30 years ago in the light of more recent theories and it turned out what with all the supposed advances over that period there was not too much more that could be said. Which I felt was interesting in itself.

I eve got a comment that it was refreshing to hear someone present such a result (of course that could just have been damning with feint praise)!

However from the opposite corner, as a publishing scientist, I am under the impression that not all reviewers fully read the manuscript. Lowering a manuscript down the Impact Factor ladder I’ve had a paper rejected five times. That’s fine by me, it happens sometimes, and four have given me critiques that helped me improve the manuscript. A fifth critique contained comments that very clearly indicated that the reviewers had read the abstract and looked at the figures but failed to read the text. Fine, on to the next journal but it was very clearly a less informed review than the other four. Peer reviewers, refereeing a paper are human and in that great bell curve of humanity there are crap ones too. Sadly also true, I guarantee, for reviewers of clinical trials papers.

“Null” data are interesting! Should I have to write to all the editors I know and campaign to have more published articles which deal with data which don’t show anything one way or another? I mean null data may reveal

(a) standard approaches are insufficient, and a new design of trial/experiment is required,
(b) the phenomenon of interest doesn’t show any relationship with anything.

Nobody seems to like option (b), but I’m pretty sure that sometimes, that’s how nature works. And I’d like to be able to see the data in those cases!

How does this vary from one discipline to another? Does anyone have any advice for getting results published without having to resort to spin? I should state that I work in physical sciences, not medicine, but the problems appear to be the same.

[bullet 2] Use this understanding to identify the most persuasive and compelling brand story possible from the available data.

“brand story”??? Really?

[bullet 3] Produce clear, accurate, creative and, above all, compelling sales copy appropriate to the given brief.

Are the words “accurate, creative” not mutually exclusive?

www.newscientistjobs.com/jobs/job/creative-medical-writer-healthcare-advertising-london-london-1400883736.htm

If we want to see more published data showing ‘no significant effect’, I expect what we need is reform of academic journals rather than changes of heart on the part of the researchers.