Rigorous, well-concieved hypothesis-driven research with lots of controls, ought to be considered as valuable as studies that show positive findings. The sad fa

Rigorous, well-concieved hypothesis-driven research with lots of controls, ought to be considered as valuable as studies that show positive findings. The sad fact is that they are not. There is also a chicken-and-egg problem here with changing the culture. Sure, I could decide tomorrow that I will no longer battle for space in the high-impact journals that usually display this bias — in favour of more enlightened journals like PLoS ONE ... and I wouldn't suffer, I have a job... but what about my grad students and postdocs? The consequences for them would be real, because biases also still exist in the minds of professors, hiring committees, and even their peers. 10 papers in PLoS ONE just are not considered the same as 10 papers (or even 5 papers) in more "established" journals. There is thus a lot of implicit pressure to just abandon studies that show null results and pursue different ideas until you find an effect. There is also huge pressure today (very explicit) to continuously generate "novel" ideas. If you want a competitive research grant now you have to generate a groundbreaking idea. If you want to publish in the top journals you have to generate groundbreaking ideas. Amazingly there are colleagues that have a success rate with grants and with high-impact publications so regular (EVERY SINGLE YEAR) ... that wow, how amazing it must be to be able to generate a brand new groundbreaking idea at such regular intervals!!! (sarcasm). And so there is yet another kind of bias present. (politics, the favoured few, the ivy-colorer-special-people, etc) I could go on with other injustices but the bottom line is that [NEWSFLASH!] science is not objective, but like all aspects of life, is chocked full of biases, politics, special interests, and cow-towing to the bottom line (i.e. money).