by ecancer reporter Audrey Nailor

What happens when experiments fail? You'd never know from simply looking at popular science outlets and the media, but most experiments are - well - experimental.  

"Negative results matter," writes Stephen Curry in a thinkpiece in the Guardian. "Their value lies in mapping out blind alleys, warning other investigators not to waste their time or at least to tread carefully."

"The only trouble is," he adds, "It can be hard to get them published."

Historically, publishing houses had little interest in publishing "failed" experimental results in peer-reviewed journals.

Negative results are not considered marketable or even valuable. They rarely accrue citations, and are thus passed over by journals concerned with appearing exciting and significant.

However, negative results still contain valuable information. What worked? What didn't? Why did it fail? What needs to be done?

A disproved hypothesis is also valuable in itself - when scientists set out to answer questions, there is always the expectation that the answer might be "no."

In medical research, the publication of negative results is even more important. Repeating failed experiments because previous attempts had not been recorded wastes time, resources, money and even lives.

In 2013, we reported that publication bias meant that a large percentage of clinical trials did not end up as published research, and their results were therefore inaccessible to prescribers, patients and the public.

Since then, the AllTrials Initiative has raised awareness of the importance of publishing the negative results of clinical trials. They've also campaigned for journals to accept and promote negative results, making them available to the public. 

Some journals - like ecancermedicalscience - already operate under the belief that articles should be assessed based on the quality of the study design and significance of the topic, not on the success of the final results.

“I believe that when negative studies illustrate important points, they should be published," says Katie Foxall, ecancer's Head of Publishing. "Our policy is that if a research question is important, original, and is answered with the right study design and sufficient power, it should be published, irrespective of the outcome.

"In many cases, the effort and care put into a clinical trial makes it worthy of publication either to report significant results or avoid duplication of effort by future researchers.”

It seems that even negative results can have a positive impact on their field - if they're given a platform from which to do so.

"There is no such thing as a failed experiment," wrote architect Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller, "only experiments with unexpected outcomes."

ecancermedicalscience, an open-access journal, encourages the submission of negative results.