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Unfortunately the bias against negative results in scientific publications cause a lot of scientific dead-ends to be non-public as well. A lot starting researc
by Darkstryder 6y ago
Unfortunately the bias against negative results in scientific publications cause a lot of scientific dead-ends to be non-public as well.
A lot starting researchers (such as PhD students) that are left without adequate supervision are likely to reach a dead-end someone previously encountered but did not publish anything about.
- hutzlibu 6y agoI have not been directly involved in academic research, but from what I understood, results gets published, whether they met the goals or not. It is still novel and valuable to publish why this certain approach or idea did not work as expected as long as you followed scientific standards.
- dzolob 6y agoI’m sorry you’re being downvoted just because you have a wrong impression of how scientific publishing works. Nobody is looking for wrong answers, there are simply many uninteresting ways to screw things up. If you are able to publish a wrong result in a worthwhile journal, a lot of right results have to be in it, which I guess makes your work “right”.
- hutzlibu 6y agoI am not sure if there was a missunderstandig: I know of people who researched topic X with the assumption to find Y. But they did not find Y and rather found out that their setup was insufficient to provide meaningful answers. So they wrote and explained about why this setup did not work for the original question and published it and moved on. And this makes sense, because they achieved novel information the next student could improve on. So published about a dead end, or not?