"Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t" Thomas A. Edison

How often have you observed during your experiments that what you had hypothesised, the independent variable you were manipulating, did not result in any effect on the dependent variables?

And when that happened, what did you think about your experiment? Assuming you had designed a perfect protocol and carried out a rigorous data collection and analysis, what did you think about the lack of positive results, or in other words, what did you think about your negative results?

Did you think your work was still worth being shared with the scientific community?

Or did you think that when nothing happens there is nothing to learn from?

Even though I am an early career physiologist, I have observed negative results or the “lack of any result” very often during my experiments. Sometimes that happened as result of a poorly designed study. Sometimes it wasn’t my fault (someone else’s fault?) and it was simply clear that the reaction I wanted to generate, the mechanism I was looking forward to explain trough my hypothesis, was just not there. It did not work like I thought.

What does happen in your mind when you do realize that?

Disappointment, frustration, failure. No way to publish the data unless you’ll find even a tiny little thing to say about the positive value of your non-findings. And it doesn't matter if to make that you have to invent an imaginary new theory based on… just on your sake of publications.

But why that has to happen? Why do we have to show that any experiment we have run has produced positive results?

Is making mistakes and errors and sharing them not the best way to make sure that others won’t do them again?

A couple of days ago, I was surfing on ResearchGate, as usual, looking for some interesting topics-discussions and by chance, I came across this question: 

Should negative results be treated with the same rigour as positive results? (https://www.researchgate.net/post/Should_negative_results_be_treated_with_the_same_rigor_as_positive_results15)

One of the things which surprised me the most was to find out that there are scientific journals, such as Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine (http://www.jnrbm.com/) that promote a discussion of unexpected, controversial, provocative and/or negative results in the context of current tenets.

That discussion inspired this post and I would strongly suggest you to give it a look.

Davide Filingeri

MPhil Researcher

Environmental Ergonomics Research Centre

Loughborough University