Hoisted from that page's comments: However, due to the nature of the publications today, nobody is going to be honest and say: "You know what, we really th

Hoisted from that page's comments: However, due to the nature of the publications today, nobody is going to be honest and say: "You know what, we really thought that this advanced technique was going to be better. We tried our best, as you can see, but the improvement is really tiny." There should be some credible way of reporting negative findings, which are surprising. There are journals, such as the Journal of Negative Results (http://www.jnr-eeb.org/index.php/jnr http://www.jnr-eeb.org/index.php/jnr) for ecology, that do try to fill this gap. But they don't have the same impact value. This is fair enough, up to a point: you should be aiming for results that will change the field.