When we measured it, the material was actually terrible and we don't understand why it's that way outside of some speculation. Unfortunately it also feels like our lab doesn't have the type of expertise to explain why it's so bad either at least not without years of learning.
My advisor's explanation on publishing was that if we had great results that followed our initial theory of what's going on then we could write a paper and nobody would question it. But, now that we contradict theory the threshold of evidence is much higher and he doesn't want to go ahead with it.
We trust our data, but he's concerned about getting it through peer review. For what it's worth we did publish it in a conference proceeding, but it doesn't have the same weight as a journal article.
Isn't that sort of the most important thing to publish? Something that contradicts theory means something new. Seems like all the more reason to pursue it, no?
Publishing something that goes against the grain means a lot more scrutiny on your work and bigger humiliation for any mistakes made. If you're publishing against the grain, you have to double triple check every single detail to make sure it's all iron-clad. This costs a lot of additional time and money. When publishing research that preaches to the choir, no such considerations are required.
In an ideal world, publishing against the grain should be encouraged and there should be no extra reputational penalty for getting caught with errors in that type of research (heaps of errors go unnoticed in mainstream papers, even popular ones). But that's not how it works sadly.
Yes, it is important to publish results that violate established theories, but if there's already a lot of validation of those theories through experimentation, you're going to have legitimate pushback, especially if your method of experimentation isn't the most sophisticated.
If the result of your publication is a theoretical breakthrough, then that's great, but unless you're in the top tier within that discipline, the likely outcome is that your research turns out to have a big flaw which you missed, and you invite a bunch of people to point out to the world that you can't do science properly...
[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/once-again-physicist...
For the purpose of producing knowledge. It does other things.
There are real issues in academia, but I disagree that what happened here is wrong. We did publish our data, we just didn't do it in a journal article. In my fields, this is actually fairly typical and journals are less of the norm unless you have a big result.
The whole problem is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Sometimes when you don't have much funding and there's only a few grad. students in the lab, that evidence is no longer worth the time to collect.
See the comments below about the "neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light" paper. There is a real danger in publishing theory-breaking results when you don't have 100% confidence in them.
