Publishing negative research

[Emma May Smith]

I'm proud to announce that the last two posts on my blog have, more or less, been failures. They prove no hypothesis nor advance our understanding. They even go against some of the things I believed or proposed, or at best leave those questions no nearer to an answer.

But publishing them is still important. Showing what we've done helps others by laying out our lines of reasoning, sharing our statistics and observations, and demonstrating that they don't really fit our hypotheses.

I encourage everybody to post their failures and be open when lines of enquiry run dead (or totally unproven).