Negative studies are useless??

Publication bias…

is a phenomenon in research community that positive studies are more likely to get published than negative ones. It’s not just PhD students, but journal editors, editorial board members (so called experts in their respective fields) who believe that negative studies did not find anything and are not worth the space of their journals.

Body of knowledge

Publication bias is a problem. Hardly, if ever, one study would change the field, the idea or the way we practice. It takes multiple studies conducted by different research groups, in different locations, at different points in time to corroborate the findings. It IS about body of evidence; evidence as a whole and not one single study that pushes us forward. If negative studies selectively get rejected, the overall results will be spuriously inflate toward positive findings. The idea, the field or the way we practice will incorrectly change as a result therefore, research community will suffer and so too the society.

In the current format the world of scientific publication provides perverse incentives (e.g. the glory, the grant and career advancement) to publish positive, interesting and ground-breaking RESULTS while overall truth is sacrificed in the process.

Conventional publication format follows below diagram where reviewing process takes place once after a study completed and a manuscript submitted.

Source: https://rrjournals.com/peer-review-process/

Proposed solution

Registered Reports is a new type of journal where review process takes place twice. First, researchers submit introduction and materials&methods section to the journal for a review. Reviewers assess justifications of research study in the introduction section and scientific rigour of materials & methods, provide feedback and determine if this study worth pursuing. If the answer is yes, researcher then conduct a study and study is guaranteed to be published no matter what the results may be provided that the manuscript meets language and readability standard in the second review.

Benefits

As a reviewer, I feel awful rejecting papers on topics that are neither important nor relevant, but are well written based on well-designed and well-executed experiments, on which researchers spent a great deal of time and efforts, for which society paid a lot of money in the form of research grant. it is equally awful when important and relevant research topics are studied with weak materials & methods.

The new publication format would save time, money and efforts of everyone involved and would perhaps bring us closer to the truth i.e. less publication bias. I am looking forward to seeing this publication concept takes hold in dentistry.

Sources

To Get More Out of Science, Show the Rejected Research by Brendan Nyhan https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/upshot/to-get-more-out-of-science-show-the-rejected-research.html