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You got a null result. Will anyone publish it?


Researchers have tried a bunch of strategies to get more negative results into the literature. Nature asks whether they are working.

Jessica Payne, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, says that there’s still a perception that scientists must have had some flaw in their research design if a study returns negative or null results. One of the most significant changes to come out of the replication crisis is the expansion of preregistration (see ‘Registrations on the rise’), in which researchers must state their hypothesis and the outcomes they intend to measure in a public database at the outset of their study (this is already the norm in clinical trials). Few physical-science journals offer the format — even though null results, such as the failure of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva in Switzerland to find new subatomic particles since the Higgs boson, have been an important part of progress.

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