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Oh, I meant #2, inconclusive results. I believe that this research is extremely valuable. Scientific contribution occurs not just by finding a story and some su
by kellogs 17y ago
Oh, I meant #2, inconclusive results. I believe that this research is extremely valuable. Scientific contribution occurs not just by finding a story and some supporting data - another source of great contribution could be saving time of many researchers by saying "this is exactly what i did. this is why i did it. and look, nothing came up." another researcher can look at it and think about improving the methodology. if published, this search to get it right becomes a-lot-of-people mission instead of a one-phd-student venture to do all the mistakes that everyone else did, and then start doing things right.
and to echo the above comments - arxiv is not prestigious. you wouldn't write a job market paper or pride yourself in terms of 10 publications in arxiv rather than 2 publications in Nature. i havent thought about the 'how', but i am convinced that the prejudice against negative data has to disappear for this whole thing to work.
- tel 17y agoI totally agree with supporting (2), it's actually something I'm interested in as a research topic. Like I mentioned, I think part of the difficulty is the non-generality of being able to summarize that sort of material. There are (orders of magnitude) more inconclusive results than telling ones. Now the idea of being able to search a scientific question and somehow find a meta-analytical summary of all the inconclusive results ever reported would be flat magical. If the summaries were really useful it'd likely generate a large number of telling results almost automatically. Of course, a resource like that is almost mythical sounding for today.
- kellogs 17y agoOh, nice. Is this research in the pipeline or are you incubating the idea for the future? I am also thinking about this as a research topic - independent summer study, to be more specific. I am hoping to give the matter some serious thought - why negative data is not considered valuable, what sorts of conditions would make it valuable, and how the framework of publishing should be, so that others can easily access, understand, and reason about the data. Are you interested in a subset of these? Do you know any resources on where to start thinking? I know there's the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, but I don't know of other efforts or perhaps societies/groups for this cause.