Talk motivated by fact that Eva has been in school for 6 years and only had one paper, spent 3 years building a system that doesn't work, etc. Tired of feeling like a failure. Can "failure" be redefined? - Shirley Wu

in science, you come up with a hypothesis, if everything works well in about 2 years you get a publication in cell/nature/science. but usually things don't work so well and you just spin your wheels and 4 years later you realize all you have are negative results. whose CV looks better? who worked harder/more? - Shirley Wu

Chris Patil encapsulates: rewards are given based on a whole bunch of factors, many of which are outside an individual's control - Shirley Wu

great topic. Congrats Eva in presenting it. - Jamie McQuay

mention of Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, PLoS ONE, Nature Precedings as places you can publish negative results. But still not any of the big 3 or journals with high IF - Shirley Wu

Eva mentions a study that looked at p-values reported in papers. Distributions should be normal-ish. But found that there's a spike right before p=0.05 and a dip right after. People were fudging their data to have "significance" so they could publish in the big journals. Credit Michael Nielsen for the story. - Shirley Wu

Mention that p-value cutoffs are pretty arbitrary. Eva comments that it's because people don't want "failure" that they are driven to manipulate data to get it published in a big journal. Peter Binfield mentions the problem with image manipulation. Chris comments that there's really no such thing as raw data anymore in many cases. - Shirley Wu

Eva now segueing into "alternative careers". Dislike of the term because it's often connoted with "failure" to succeed in an academic career. "Death in the family" response when you tell people you're not going to do a post-doc, etc. - Shirley Wu

a lot of participants feeling like failure is in the eye of the beholder. If you don't feel like you've failed, then you haven't. Do we need to worry about the idea of failure in academia? "alternative" career implies a minority, but it's actually the majority. - Shirley Wu

how to value the work that went into the long and convoluted path that didn't end in a cell nature science paper? this could come out of an in depth interview with the person. But how will that person get an interview? - Shirley Wu

Journal of Negative Results - http://www.jnrbm.com/ - Shirley Wu

Would getting your negative results published in PLoS or some other journal be worth the effort of writing up something that's most likely not as exciting to you as a positive result? - Shirley Wu

Of course, publishing negative results is very valuable to science as a whole, avoid wasting resources, greater efficiency, etc. So more altruistic than anything else. Keep someone else from suffering through your pain. (This doesn't necessarily work in the corporate world which is much more competitive) - Shirley Wu

PLoS model - don't determine what is important, just what is valid. In the future, everything will be important to someONE, but we can't know who or when now. They don't want to game their IF at the expense of not publishing science that could help someone eventually. - Shirley Wu

in the life sciences especially, there are so many ways to get things wrong; it's so important to eliminate as many of those paths as possible by getting the negative results out there and published. - Shirley Wu

The perfect paper: negative results + all the things we did to verify the negative result. OR positive results + all the things we tried that didn't work - Shirley Wu

Dangers with publishing negative results: can be very difficult to publish a positive result that contradicts it. What if you just did something wrong? Maybe your result would have been positive too. Things can be negative either because your hypothesis is wrong, OR you did things wrong. - Shirley Wu

An important and seldom-discussed topic; all credit to Eva and the rest for this discussion - Neil Saunders