These last days I’ve been following the twitter campaign #negativeresults to promote the publication of negative results. In the end, negative results are also results and could save the time of many other fellow researchers wasting their lives doing experiments that other people already know will bring them nowhere.
It would be great if you’d be able to publish negative results in the same conference/journals where you publish the positives ones (so that they also count for your CV) but I’m afraid this is still a long shot at the moment (a similar problem happens when you try to publish replication of previous experiments/studies). Nevertheless, this shouldn’t be used as an excuse. If you believe in open science, it’s now easy to have an open lab notebook where you can publish all these negative results. Of course, unless you’re in science primarily to get a position and not to advance the field.
If you want a graphical way to explain the benefits of publishing negative results to your colleagues, I think there’s no better way than this cartoon. Enjoy!
an interesting topic Jon Whittle, his students and I (plus others) were discussing recently