3 ms·

From the article: “A 2022 survey of scientists in France, for instance, found that 75% were willing to publish null results they had produced, but only 12.5% we

by borski 2y ago

From the article: “A 2022 survey of scientists in France, for instance, found that 75% were willing to publish null results they had produced, but only 12.5% were able to do so.”

EvgeniyZh 2y ago
The question is how many of them are willing to review and read these publications. Of course as an individual scientist (not me, but someone who does experiments), I'd love to capitalize on my work, even if it is unsuccessful (in the sense of null result), by publishing it. But do I, and scientific community in general, care about null results? I'd say mostly no. Null results, if universally published, would overwhelm already overwhelmed publication system. If you think it will be helpful to others to know about specific failure, put it in a blogpost or even on arxiv. Or talk about it at conference (for CS, workshop). Also, if we use publications as a measure of scientists success, and we do, is a scientist with a lot of null results really successful?
- caddemon 2y ago
  Obviously most scientists are not going to be interested in null results from adjacent subfields, but when it comes to specific questions of interest it is absolutely useful to know what has been tried before and how it was done/what was observed. I know a lab that had documentation not only on their own historical null results but also various anecdotes from colleagues' labs about specific papers that were difficult to replicate, reagents that were often problematic, etc. That is a non-ideal way for the scientific community at large to maintain such info. Trying to go through traditional peer review process is probably also non-ideal for this type of work though, for reasons you cited. We need to be willing to look at publication as something more broadly defined in order to incentivize the creation of and contribution to that sort of knowledge base. It shouldn't be implemented as a normal journal just meant for null results - there's really no need for this sort of thing to be peer reviewed specifically at the prepub stage. But it should still count as a meaningful type of scientific contribution.

by borski 2y ago

From the article: “A 2022 survey of scientists in France, for instance, found that 75% were willing to publish null results they had produced, but only 12.5% were able to do so.”

EvgeniyZh 2y ago

The question is how many of them are willing to review and read these publications. Of course as an individual scientist (not me, but someone who does experiments), I'd love to capitalize on my work, even if it is unsuccessful (in the sense of null result), by publishing it. But do I, and scientific community in general, care about null results? I'd say mostly no. Null results, if universally published, would overwhelm already overwhelmed publication system. If you think it will be helpful to others to know about specific failure, put it in a blogpost or even on arxiv. Or talk about it at conference (for CS, workshop). Also, if we use publications as a measure of scientists success, and we do, is a scientist with a lot of null results really successful?

caddemon 2y ago
Obviously most scientists are not going to be interested in null results from adjacent subfields, but when it comes to specific questions of interest it is absolutely useful to know what has been tried before and how it was done/what was observed. I know a lab that had documentation not only on their own historical null results but also various anecdotes from colleagues' labs about specific papers that were difficult to replicate, reagents that were often problematic, etc. That is a non-ideal way for the scientific community at large to maintain such info. Trying to go through traditional peer review process is probably also non-ideal for this type of work though, for reasons you cited. We need to be willing to look at publication as something more broadly defined in order to incentivize the creation of and contribution to that sort of knowledge base. It shouldn't be implemented as a normal journal just meant for null results - there's really no need for this sort of thing to be peer reviewed specifically at the prepub stage. But it should still count as a meaningful type of scientific contribution.