From crisis to crisis

In September this year, David Crotty wrote an blog post about two colliding crises – each in the context with negative results. The first crisis is described as a “reproducibility crisis, based on the assumption that a majority of published experiments is in fact unreproducible. The second crisis is referred to as “negative results crisis”, describing that a large amount of correct results remains unpublished, due to its null-result character. Both crises are described to cause a considerable waste of time for scientists – either in performing published experiments that however cannot succeed, or by repeating unsuccessful experiments that have not been published.

One attempt to overcome the problem of negative results was suggested by Annie Franco, Neil Malhotra and Gabor Simonovits, namely by “creating high-status publication outlets for these studies”. Bu I have to agree that this is easily said.

How willing are researchers to publicly display their failures? How much career credit should be granted for doing experiments that didn’t work?

Even though theses problems are clearly not new (I decidated this blog to negative results for a reason), I was surprised to see them actually described as “crises”. I do think that there is a problem of science losing trust by the public, caused by the omnipresent publish-or-perish paradigm.