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0 pointstechdragon2y ago0 comments

This waste of effort by way of duplicating unpublished negative results is a big factor in why replicated results deserve to be rated more highly than results that have not been replicated regardless of the prestige of the researchers or the institutions involved… if no one can prove your work work was correct… how much can anyone trust your work…

I have gone down the rabbit hole of engineering research before and 90% of the time I’ve managed to find an anecdote or subsequent research footnotes or actual subsequent research publications, that substantially invalidated the lofty claims of the engineers in the 70s or 80s (which is amazing still despite this, a genuine treasure trove of research unused and sometimes useful aerospace engineering research and development) and unfortunately outside the few proper publications, a lot of the invalidations are not properly reverse cited research material and I could have spent a week cross referencing before I spot the link and realise the unnamed work they are saying they are proving wrong is actually some footnotes containing the only published data (before their new paper) on some old work that has a bad scan copy on the NASA NTRS server under some obscure title and no related keywords to the topic the research is notionally about…

Academic research can genuinely suck sometimes… particularly when you want to actually apply it.

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aeternum2y ago

Publishing positive/noteworth results only does seem like an embarrassingly obvious major flaw in academia and the greater scientific community.

A research assistant would quickly be thrown out if he/she refused to record negative experimental results, yet we somehow decide that is fine when operating as a collective.

godelski2y ago

Alternatively, maybe researchers should be encouraged to publish all kinds of results and not just "novel" work. Successes, failures, insights, etc. This idea of how we evaluate researchers is often silly. We're asking people to push the bounds of knowledge and we don't know what will come from it or how long it will take. But we are hyper focused on this short term evaluation.

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