There is nothing wrong with publishing negative results, and, in fact, it is actually a good idea. When researchers engage in “file drawer bias” by not submitting negative results (or when journals engage in “publication bias” by declining to accept negative studies) the published record becomes skewed in favor of positive results, whether they are representative or not, as XKCD illustrated so well:
The issue is not that of publishing negative results, the issue is the use of misleading claims that results short of the threshold chosen for statistical significance are statistically significant. This relates to your other post about scientific publishing:
Replication, or reproducibility, is a key to the methodology of science. Not only are many initial studies not replicable, journals often refuse to publish negative results of attempts to replicate a study.
Evidence for precognition is big news, but leading journals won’t touch repeat studies that fail to replicate the results.
The bias against negative studies is, I think, one of the reasons that people try to claim that negative results are positive. We should encourage the publication of high quality negative studies. Doing so may be a way to reduce the perceived incentives to make misleading claims about the statistical significance of study results.
