In all the sciences, peer reviewed journals are filled to the brim with exciting articles showing a positive result. The reader is rarely subjected to the apparently ‘useless’ exercise of reading an article that shows no correlation, unexpected outcomes from established tests, or short-comings in existing experimental methods. On the surface, it does indeed seem logical to skip the negative results.
In fact this approach limits decision making at many levels. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that latest & greatest (& usually more expensive) diagnostic method probably does no better than your current one? Or how handy would it be to know that in certain circumstances, socio-economic factors do not influence treatment outcomes? Considering the amounts of money and time devoted to diagnostics, or to community health programs based on variability of treatment outcomes, the value of these individual negative results is already apparent.
Progress is based as much on disproving assumed relationships as it is on finding new ones. Sir Ronald Ross was no doubt aware of this when he included his negative findings on contaminated drinking water in writing up his research about malaria transmission. While it’s fun to speculate whether Ross was motivated by a desire to show up proponents of alternate theories, or he really was just a thorough and public-health minded man, the real question is, was the information useful? I’d say that any forward thinking bureaucrat might have found that knowledge useful. Still, I’d love to go check out all the things archived and now being preserved in the Ross Project to find out more about his thoughts on the matter J
The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine – be there or be left behind!
