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Comment by Fede_V | Hacker News Reader

I would agree with this if researchers were not under insane pressure to produce findings (as opposed to understanding).

If a researcher designs a great experiment, but after collecting and analyzing all the data comes to the conclusion that there is no link between eating chocolate and health, then she will a horrible time publishing it in a respected science journal, even if that's what the data says.

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I strongly disagree. The vast majority of published articles I stumble across conclude with "we didn't find anything". They are published in journals, but almost never make it into The Times. I'm definitely not saying research pressure doesn't exist or doesn't have an impact on research quality, but I think selection bias is hard at work here.

"We didn't find anything" is fine for a random journal (there is a saying in academia that everything gets published eventually), but that's not going to get you into Cell, Nature, or Science, or a similarly top-tier venue. That's where the stress lies, and why negative results are pointedly lacking in the literature.

I wonder if this is a dogmatic pressure or a financial pressure? Second could probably be solved by increasing public funding but not sure about how one would approach the first.

There are a billion things about which you could publish a negative result, and it's hard to judge whether a negative result is particularly interesting. On the other hand, positive results are fewer and thus a priori more interesting than negative results. They also stimulate follow-up research much more than a negative result.

Since journals want to publish interesting articles more than boring ones, and articles that are likely to be cited more often than articles without follow-up results, there is a bias against accepting negative results. As scientists are judged by the number of things they get published, and the number of citations their papers get, they have every incentive to only publish positive results.

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