Your professor is teaching a class on research methods. Write a post responding to the professor's question. Express and support your opinion and contribute to the discussion in your own words. An effective response has at least 100 words.
Dr. Ravi Menon
Most published studies report experiments that worked. Experiments that found nothing are often left in a drawer, and some people argue that journals should be obliged to publish them. Others say this would bury useful work under a pile of failures. What do you think, and why?
Sofia
Publishing them should be compulsory. If ten groups test the same idea and one gets a positive result by chance, only that one appears, and the field believes something that is not there. The nine invisible studies are exactly the information a reader needs in order to judge the tenth.
Karl
I would not force it. A study that found nothing may have found nothing because it was badly run, and a rule that publishes every such result rewards carelessness. Readers would have to sort good failures from bad ones, and most of them have neither the time nor the expertise.