yes. most likely, what the supervisor means is that the research should have some kind of story and conclusion. an 'unsuccessful' piece of research is one that

yes. most likely, what the supervisor means is that the research should have some kind of story and conclusion. an 'unsuccessful' piece of research is one that does not say anything, i.e. "well we tried to replicate this other paper and you know what, we did" or "I had an idea and I thought really hard about it for about a year, but nothing really concrete ever presented itself in either theory or experimentation". a lot of people are kind of grumpy about null hypotheses not being published, for example papers of the form "we tried X and weren't able to make it work, here is how we tried". that is an 'unsuccessful' result (maybe you just suck), but some people would like to be able to read through stories of failure to see if there is a way to be successful. the journal of the null hypothesis (http://www.jasnh.com/ http://www.jasnh.com/) is an effort to do something like this, but it's generally the punchline of jokes...