Peer Review Journal Why Is Transhumanism Seen as Negative

Why information technology'due south fourth dimension to publish research "failures"

Publishing bias favors positive results; now there'south a movement to change that

By Lucy Goodchild van Hilten     Posted on v May 2015

After hours of testing, retesting, checking and confirming, Dr. Jones closes her lab book; her experiments have not disproved the naught hypothesis and they don't support her new theory. She leaves her negative results behind, moving on to work on something new in the hope that she'll take a positive outcome side by side time.

Meanwhile, what happened in her lab will stay in her lab. No indicate in publishing negative results, later all.

Or is there?

Publication bias affects the torso of scientific noesis in different ways, including skewing it towards statistically pregnant or "positive" results. This means that the results of thousands of experiments that neglect to confirm the efficacy of a handling or vaccine – including the outcomes of clinical trials – fail to come across the low-cal of day.

Now, a movement is gaining momentum to counter this bias.

Recently, the World Wellness Organization (WHO) appear its position on publishing the results of clinical trials, calling for the chief findings to be submitted for publication in a peer reviewed journal within 12 months of study completion, and for all previously unreported results – including negative findings – to exist published.

Meanwhile, new journals like New Negatives in Found Science, approaches like Registered Reports and initiatives like the All Trials campaign are trying to balance the literature by encouraging researchers to publish their negative results.

To empathise the claiming they face, it helps to sympathize why inquiry and publication are then focused on positive results. The answer is not every bit elementary as y'all might call up.

In his 1963 collection Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, science philosopher Karl Popper wrote: "Refutations accept frequently been regarded as establishing the failure of a scientist, or at to the lowest degree of his theory. Information technology should be stressed that this is an inductivist error. Every refutation should exist regarded every bit a slap-up success. … Even if a new theory … should meet an early death, it should non be forgotten; rather its dazzler should be remembered, and history should record our gratitude to information technology."

Perhaps the all-time-known example of a scientific refutation occurred in 1897 when Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley published the results of their experiment to find the relative motion of thing through the "luminiferous aether." Their newspaper "On the relative motility of the Globe and the luminiferous ether," in the American Periodical of Science, described what has come up to exist known as the most famous failed experiment ever. The authors summarized their disappointing findings:

This new explanation… failed to business relationship for the fact proved by experiment that the aberration was unchanged when observations were made with a telescope filled with h2o.

A few years later, Einstein developed his theory of special relativity, motivated in office by Michelson and Morley's lack of evidence for the luminiferous ether. This is widely recognized equally the starting point for the "2nd Scientific Revolution," and information technology contributed to Michelson existence awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize in Physics – a rare accolade for a "negative" effect. But why is it such an unusual example?

The power of negative results

In their editorial in Disease Models & Mechanisms, Dr. Natalie Matosin and her colleagues from the University of Wollongong and the Schizophrenia Research Institute in Sydney, Australia debate that "Scientific discipline is, by its nature, a collaborative discipline, and ane of the principal reasons why we should report negative results is and then our colleagues do non waste product their time and resources repeating our findings."

The majority of negative results serve this purpose – to add to our cognition and function as a collaboration tool. Just some, like the Michelson-Morley experiment, turn out to have huge significance.

When he looked back over his work to relate his career, Prof. Dr. Anthony Cerami, translational medicine pioneer and the Hermann Boerhaave Visiting Professor of Medicine at Leiden University, said he was surprised to see how pregnant his negative results had been:

Many of the biggest discoveries of my career were the results of failure of another research project. ... Failure strikes a negative tone, simply information technology appeared in my personal history that it was an essential experience on the path to important discoveries.

Prof. Cerami describes one of these failures. He and his colleagues had come up upwardly with a number of compounds with the potential to fight trypanosome infection, a parasite that affects cattle. They travelled to Kenya to test one item compound in cattle, which promptly died within minutes of administration.

The "handling" soon became the joke of the boondocks, but Prof. Cerami saw the value in the results, noticing that in that location must be something other than the parasite causing wasting in the cattle. He was right, and the protein they eventually isolated was tumor necrosis gene (TNF). He continued to work on the poly peptide, eventually revealing its important role in inflammatory diseases including rheumatoid arthritis.

Publication bias: a publishing problem?

Despite their potential, negative results are repeatedly relegated to the lab books, the drawers and the trash bins. This is not a new phenomenon – research published in Controlled Clinical Trials in 1987 showed that statistically significant clinical trial results were three times more likely to exist published than those supporting the null hypothesis.

Mayhap surprisingly, the researchers concluded that rather than being a effect of editorial decisions, this was because scientists were failing to write up and submit papers describing their negative results.

When Matt Shipman, public information officer at Due north Carolina University, wrote about publishing negative results, he saw a flurry of social media activeness – many researchers thought it was important, but some weren't then keen on the idea. Peter Dudek was one of the people who responded on Twitter: "If I chronicled all my negative results during my studies, the thesis would accept been twenty,000 pages instead of 200."

The bookish community has developed a culture that overwhelmingly supports statistically significant, "positive" results. Researchers themselves strive for these results and rush to publish them, leaving the "failed" attempts in the dust. How can this culture be shifted towards valuing negative results?

The function of publishing in changing perceptions

Publishing is a major cistron in academic success, and then the publishing industry is in a position to change this bookish culture and publication bias. In recent years, publishers and journals have been encouraging more than submissions of negative results, specially for clinical trials.

This is an area in which publication bias is being tackled from different angles. Launched by Sense Near Science in 2013, the All Trials campaign calls for "all past and present clinical trials to be registered and their total methods and summary results reported." According to the campaign website, "Millions of volunteers have participated in clinical trials to help find out more nigh the effects of treatments on affliction, nevertheless that important upstanding principle about reporting has been widely ignored."

The WHO'southward declaration is a big win for the All Trials campaign, whose response explains the importance of publishing all results:

This is a stiff statement from the WHO. It has been welcomed by patients, doctors and researchers worldwide. The best available evidence shows that effectually half of all the clinical trials that take ever been carried out have never reported results. … It ways that information about the medicines we use every 24-hour interval is at adventure of beingness lost forever.

To promote and enable the ongoing publication of new clinical trials data, many journals are encouraging submissions describing negative results. Ane journal published past Elsevier is taking it a step further: Cortex has launched a section called Registered Reports, which commits to publishing the outcome of a trial before it has been completed.

"Our aim with Registered Reports is to enhance the transparency and reproducibility of scientific discipline by reviewing study protocols earlier experiments are conducted," said Prof. Chris Chambers, Registered Reports Editor of Cortex and one of the concept'south founders, in the launch announcement. "If we remember the protocol has merit nosotros will commit, in accelerate, to publishing the outcomes. Armed with this provisional acceptance of their work, authors can perform the research safe in the knowledge that the results themselves will not make up one's mind the article'southward publication."

A plant science journal defended to negative results

It'southward not just the clinical trials literature that is missing negative results – any experimental discipline that works on the footing of a hypothesis runs the chance of this bias.

"All these results exist, but they are not published," said Dr. Emma Granqvist, Publisher of Elsevier'southward New Negatives in Plant Science, who was a researcher in molecular establish scientific discipline. "Researchers are saying that if they submit these results, periodical editors volition decline their manuscripts considering they're not interesting or loftier impact."

New Negatives in Plant Science aims to accost this by publishing only negative results. "Some people disagree with having a journal purely for negative results, saying it'due south the wrong approach – that all journals should publish these results," Dr. Granqvist said. "Ideally, this would be the case, but information technology's not realistic. A shift like this takes time – it's about changing attitudes. This is the first step, a spotlight on the fact that negative results are largely missing from the literature."

The linguistic communication around results has an effect, too, Dr, Granqvist added. "By calling these results 'negative,' they are immediately less highly-seasoned – particularly to the researchers themselves, who usually neglect to publish them.

"This isn't an issue in every subject area; in mathematics, for instance, counter-proofs and proofs past contradiction are all considered logical and are non equally readily labeled as a failure," she explained. "Perhaps we can take some inspiration from fields like this and start to value all results more equally."

Related stories

• "Why science needs to publish negative results" (Editors Update, March 2015)
• "AllTrials campaign and petition back up greater clinical trial transparency" (Elsevier Connect, June 2014)

Positively negative journals

An increasing number of journals proactively publish negative results. Here are a few of them:

• New Negatives in Constitute Science. Publishes hypothesis-driven, scientifically audio studies that describe unexpected, controversial, dissenting, and/or null (negative) results in basic found sciences.
• Journal of Negative Results. Provides an online medium to publish peer-reviewed, sound scientific work in ecology and evolutionary biological science that is scientifically rigorous but does non rely upon arbitrary significance thresholds to support conclusions.
• Periodical of Negative Results in BioMedicine. Provides a platform for the publication and discussion of unexpected, controversial, provocative and/or negative results in the context of electric current tenets.
• Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results. Publishes original, innovative and novel research manufactures resulting in negative results; publishes theoretical and empirical papers that written report the negative findings and research failures in pharmaceutical field.
• The All Results journals. The main objective of the four journals – Chem, Nano, Biol and Phys – is to recover and publish negative results, valuable pieces of information in science.

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Elsevier Connect Contributor

Afterward a few accidents, Lucy Goodchild van Hilten discovered that she'due south a much amend writer than a scientist. Following an MSc in the History of Science, Medicine and Applied science at Imperial College London, she became Assistant Editor of Microbiology Today. A stint in the printing office at Imperial saw her stories on the forepart pages, and she moved to Amsterdam to work at Elsevier as Senior Marketing Communications Director for Life Sciences.

She'due south now a freelance writer at Tell Lucy. Tweet her @LucyGoodchild.

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Source: https://www.elsevier.com/connect/scientists-we-want-your-negative-results-too

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