4 ms·

That sucks to hear. Null results are important, as you say, if only to dissuade others from doing the same. See also the "file-drawer problem" (https://en.wiki

That sucks to hear. Null results are important, as you say, if only to dissuade others from doing the same. See also the "file-drawer problem" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias). Also, with regards to the incentives in the field and the lack of null results, there's always Ioannidis's classic work (https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...).

kraetzin 6y ago
Those are some good reads, and have absolutely been my experience. It's depressing how many publications that I've come across don't provide the whole story, and are probably false. I've found that looking at what a paper doesn't report can be far more important that what they claim.
- mycall 6y ago
  I wonder how many novel techniques could come out of these types of reports if they were actually analyzed by ML or NLP.
  - owenshen24 6y ago
    I definitely think there's more room for this sort of guided / ML analysis, but I'm not quite sure to make traction on extracting the structure of scientific papers...hopefully someone with more experience can chime in. I think paper discovery has recently suffered a huge boon thanks to ConnectedPapers, though. [https://www.connectedpapers.com/ https://www.connectedpapers.com/]
mikk14 6y ago
I disagree. Negative results are important. Null results are of very limited interest. The two are worlds apart. A null result simply means you tried something and it didn't work. But you don't know why. You haven't proven it didn't work. There are literally millions of reasons why something might not work. For instance, you could try to use compound X to cure disease Y, observe no effect, and conclude that X doesn't cure Y. But what if somewhere in the process of making X you made an uncaught mistake and you instead used X'? A negative result means that you tried something and you came to the proven conclusion it doesn't work. This is, crucially, as hard to obtain as a positive result. In my example, it would imply a much longer process than simply "apply X, see no effect in Y, make a few robustness checks, done". You could say "Well, publish the null anyway, somebody will catch the mistake". Unlikely. There are already so many papers out there that keeping up is impossible. If we were publishing also null results this number will grow tenfold at the very least. Nobody could possibly check everything. They will see a paper "X doesn't cure Y" and call it knowledge, stifling a possible cure virtually forever. Am I splitting hairs? Perhaps. But I think HN prizes itself to be a scientifically minded community, and thus it has a mandate to use terms correctly. Confusing "null" with "negative" is a sin. I hope one day I'll find a way to strongly and passionately argue against the "null results are as important as positive results" position. It is a bad meme. Charitably, I consider it most of the times a honest mistake. But sometimes it gives me the impression it is a cheap trick used by people to erode the reputation of academia.
- tralarpa 6y ago
  > Negative results are important. Null results are of very limited interest. Correct. There is a highly cited paper in CS where the author showed that a mathematical model that was widely used in research didn't actually work (anymore) in reality. That paper was the starting point of a lot of new research in that field.
  - shrimpx 6y ago
    Can you add a citation for that paper?
- learnstats2 6y ago
  I understand that people generally mean 'null results' here, by your definition, when they say 'null results'. That's the intent. Null results are also important. Suppression of null results allows for p-hacking and confirmation biases to creep into research, and greatly reduces the power of literature reviews.
  - mikk14 6y ago
    True, but I'm not really arguing against what you're saying. It is true that, when you have a positive (or a negative!) result you should also report on the nulls you obtained on the way (most likely in the supplementary materials) as a compendium of the result, to put it into context. What I'm arguing against is publishing a null result as a stand-alone publication. This creates the illusion of it being somehow a "result", which is not (in fact, we should stop calling them "results" altogether). With a null you haven't proven anything, and thus it is not a sufficient basis for a publication.
    - owenshen24 6y ago
      I see. Thanks for adding to the clarification. I think that the presentation of nulls as "results" can definitely be disingenuous. Ideally, science would have a better database to keep track of what people find, where we could add nulls in a way that doesn't highlight their "importance". As the person above says, reporting nulls is still useful to prevent p-hacking and publication bias. (Of course, ideally I think we'd be better off focusing on reporting the data in a Bayesian approach, but that hasn't really gotten traction in the broader community.)

kraetzin 6y ago

Those are some good reads, and have absolutely been my experience. It's depressing how many publications that I've come across don't provide the whole story, and are probably false. I've found that looking at what a paper doesn't report can be far more important that what they claim.

mycall 6y ago
I wonder how many novel techniques could come out of these types of reports if they were actually analyzed by ML or NLP.
- owenshen24 6y ago
  I definitely think there's more room for this sort of guided / ML analysis, but I'm not quite sure to make traction on extracting the structure of scientific papers...hopefully someone with more experience can chime in. I think paper discovery has recently suffered a huge boon thanks to ConnectedPapers, though. [https://www.connectedpapers.com/ https://www.connectedpapers.com/]

mikk14 6y ago

I disagree. Negative results are important. Null results are of very limited interest. The two are worlds apart. A null result simply means you tried something and it didn't work. But you don't know why. You haven't proven it didn't work. There are literally millions of reasons why something might not work. For instance, you could try to use compound X to cure disease Y, observe no effect, and conclude that X doesn't cure Y. But what if somewhere in the process of making X you made an uncaught mistake and you instead used X'? A negative result means that you tried something and you came to the proven conclusion it doesn't work. This is, crucially, as hard to obtain as a positive result. In my example, it would imply a much longer process than simply "apply X, see no effect in Y, make a few robustness checks, done". You could say "Well, publish the null anyway, somebody will catch the mistake". Unlikely. There are already so many papers out there that keeping up is impossible. If we were publishing also null results this number will grow tenfold at the very least. Nobody could possibly check everything. They will see a paper "X doesn't cure Y" and call it knowledge, stifling a possible cure virtually forever. Am I splitting hairs? Perhaps. But I think HN prizes itself to be a scientifically minded community, and thus it has a mandate to use terms correctly. Confusing "null" with "negative" is a sin. I hope one day I'll find a way to strongly and passionately argue against the "null results are as important as positive results" position. It is a bad meme. Charitably, I consider it most of the times a honest mistake. But sometimes it gives me the impression it is a cheap trick used by people to erode the reputation of academia.

tralarpa 6y ago
> Negative results are important. Null results are of very limited interest. Correct. There is a highly cited paper in CS where the author showed that a mathematical model that was widely used in research didn't actually work (anymore) in reality. That paper was the starting point of a lot of new research in that field.
- shrimpx 6y ago
  Can you add a citation for that paper?
learnstats2 6y ago
I understand that people generally mean 'null results' here, by your definition, when they say 'null results'. That's the intent. Null results are also important. Suppression of null results allows for p-hacking and confirmation biases to creep into research, and greatly reduces the power of literature reviews.
- mikk14 6y ago
  True, but I'm not really arguing against what you're saying. It is true that, when you have a positive (or a negative!) result you should also report on the nulls you obtained on the way (most likely in the supplementary materials) as a compendium of the result, to put it into context. What I'm arguing against is publishing a null result as a stand-alone publication. This creates the illusion of it being somehow a "result", which is not (in fact, we should stop calling them "results" altogether). With a null you haven't proven anything, and thus it is not a sufficient basis for a publication.
  - owenshen24 6y ago
    I see. Thanks for adding to the clarification. I think that the presentation of nulls as "results" can definitely be disingenuous. Ideally, science would have a better database to keep track of what people find, where we could add nulls in a way that doesn't highlight their "importance". As the person above says, reporting nulls is still useful to prevent p-hacking and publication bias. (Of course, ideally I think we'd be better off focusing on reporting the data in a Bayesian approach, but that hasn't really gotten traction in the broader community.)