Positively Negative

Some may say that science is overly positive. Researchers are constantly on the hunt for positive results. There is a certain allure to discovering a new process; it’s a lot more satisfying to say that “x leads to y,” instead of “x has no effect on y.” This positivity bias leads to many experiments with negative results pushed to the side when it does not fit the narrative that the scientist is crafting for publication. As a result, the published literature lacks a full picture of what is and (is not) happening in nature.  To combat this, there are some journals that have been created solely to publish negative data. For example, The Journal of Negative Results, Ecology and Evolution Biology aims to publish studies that have scientific rigor but yielded negative results, in an effort to “expand the capacity for formulating generalizations.” These types of journals do seem to be shifting the tide, if only just a little, toward the publication of negative results. The Journal of Negative Results inBioMedicine, which launched in 2002, is now defunct as of September 2017, stating that since their launch, other journals have begun to publish negative or null results alongside reports of positive results. While this is encouraging, many of the high impact journals place little to no emphasis on the publication of negative results. If the journals that have the most visibility do not place as much value on null results, then it is likely that many of the scientists that have the desire to publish in those journals will bias themselves against prioritizing their negative data by attempting to publish it. Matosin et al., (2014) argues that the publication of negative results is not merely making a story out of nothing and that all data should be published whether positive or negative, along with a hypothesis to explain the data. Just as scientists can think of and discuss reasons why something is happening, they should be able to think of and discuss reasons why something is not happening.