ABSTRACT
Science is often romanticised as a flawless system of knowledge building, where scientists work together to systematically find answers. In reality, this is not always the case. Dissemination of results are straightforward when the findings are positive, but what happens when you obtain results that support the null hypothesis, or do not fit with the current scientific thinking? In this Editorial, we discuss the issues surrounding publication bias and the difficulty in communicating negative results. Negative findings are a valuable component of the scientific literature because they force us to critically evaluate and validate our current thinking, and fundamentally move us towards unabridged science.
Footnotes
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Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
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Funding
All authors are supported by the Schizophrenia Research Institute, utilising infrastructure funding from the NSW Ministry of Health. N.M. and J.S.L. acknowledge Australian Rotary Health for support in the form of an Ian Scott Scholarship.
- © 2014. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
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