To Get More Out of Science, Show the Rejected Research
In physics, we have been aggressively publishing negative results for decades. There is an entire field dedicated to such work, called "Physics Beyond the Standard Model" (spoiler: there isn't any). I've seen entire careers of extremely good experimentalists dedicated to "failing to reject the null hypothesis" at more an more stringent limits (neutrinoless double beta decay is a good example of this) and have been to week-long conferences where every single paper was either a crazy theory or a negative experimental result.<p>I left the field 15 years ago because I didn't want to spend my career measuring zero, and presumably over time it will eventually dry up. The conditions for its existence seem to be more to do with having a highly trained group of people who have exhausted all plausible avenues of research in a given area and are left chasing a few scraps. In areas where there are still plenty of positive results to be had, the tendency will always be to emphasize the positive.<p>As a partial solution to this tendency, in my applied physics work, where I did get positive results, I tried to include a section in papers entitled "Things That Didn't Work So Well" that sketched failed approaches to save other people the trouble of trying stuff that seemed like a good idea but didn't pan out... at the very least we should expect that from the average publication, and be suspicious of any experimental paper that does not include some description of the blind alleys.