Tips to turn failed experiments into success stories
Science works by building upon the works of your colleagues. Using the available knowledge, you form a hypothesis to solve a scientific problem and set out to test your hypothesis by performing experiments. The result of these experiments helps you learn the truth and solve the problem. However, contrary to popular belief, the road to scientific success is not so plain and smooth. Every scientist who performs scientific experiments knows that failed experiments are integral to one’s scientific journey and can occur daily. However, these so-called “failed” experiments do not necessarily mean the end of the world. They do not lead to a failure in your scientific career. Instead, these failed experiments often establish the foundation of your success story in science.
As per the tradition, scientists are often judged by the scientific publications they produce and the journals where they publish them. However, traditional journals would only allow the publication of “positive results” — in other words, results that support your hypothesis. However, with time, the scientific research ecosystem has become aware that not just these positive results but also the results from failed experiments are crucial for the advancement of science.
Publishing the Unpublishable: Negative Results
As negative results are gaining importance over time, several scientific journals have amended their guidelines and now publish negative results, too. The journal PLOS One has published collections called the Positively Negative Collection and The Missing Pieces: A Collection of Negative, Null and Inconclusive Results, which exclusively deal with negative or inconclusive results that have been well-validated scientifically. Other journals, like Scientific Reports, F1000Research, PeerJ, etc., understand the significance of negative and inconclusive results and allow scientists to submit and publish those results. Similar to regular journals, journals such as the Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results, Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine, and Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis have come up as journals that only publish negative results.
Sharing the Research Methodology
Methods are often overlooked when talking about scientific publications. They can also be tweaked for each experiment and could have a different outcome. Optimising a protocol takes much time and effort before a researcher can even perform an experiment. Hence, not just the data generated in experiments with negative results but also the experimental protocols could be helpful for the research community. Repositories like protocols.io and Nature Protocol Exchange allow the submission and sharing of experimental protocols. Some of these platforms also allow versioning of the protocols used for successive experiments to make scientists aware of the minute differences. Specific peer-reviewed journals also exclusively publish research methodology, which includes Nature Methods, Elsevier’s Methods, Cell Reports Methods, Analytical Methods, Research Synthesis Methods, etc.
Besides sharing or publishing the methodology using repositories or written articles, you could also share videos of the experimental protocols in the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), a peer-reviewed scientific video journal that spans the fields of biological, chemical, and physical sciences.
Sharing Statistical Methods and Computational Pipeline
Several studies that generate negative results often remain incomplete, although researchers spend significant time crafting computational workflows and analysing datasets with multiple statistical methods. While there are data repositories that help in sharing these works, today, we also have journals that publish statistical methods and computational pipelines used in a study. Scientific Data, The Open Bioinformatics Journal, and Computational Statistics represent some of them.
Preprints to Your Rescue: To Do All that Traditional Journals Could Not, and Beyond
Preprints are documented manuscripts that are uploaded without peer review. However, once uploaded, the scientific community can review preprints. Preprints can address the issue of journal publications on multiple fronts. One of them is sharing negative results. Preprints also allow you to upload iterative versions of works-in-progress, which could include negative results. As a document with a digital object identifier, which is required for scientific publications, preprints allow you to reach out to others in the field using documented evidence of your work to receive feedback on the job, which could reshape the findings using other’s perspectives. Several preprint servers, such as ArXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and OSF Preprints, are available today to help easily share research. While each server will have specific scopes, preprints can also be used to share research methodologies. Similarly, much like negative results, replicative studies — studies that retry to conduct some published piece of research for validation — could be published only in a few journals or shared as preprints. If the parental research was not executed well, these replicative studies may result in negative outcomes.
Grant Applications: Can Negative Results be Useful?
While research grant applications are assessed based on the originality, relevance, significance, and feasibility of the proposed work, it is also incumbent on the researchers to demonstrate experience and perseverance. Your failed experiments or negative results could help you prove that. When experiments are carefully crafted and scientifically validated several times using different methods, negative results could not just act as pilot data for a grant application but also as proof of your experience and the capability to use grants more effectively as you’re aware of what would not work.
Before you go, one last thing!
As several repositories, journals, and preprint servers are providing a platform to share your negative results, research methodology, datasets, and replicative studies, it is crucial to review the scope and guidelines of each platform before proceeding with the submission, as many of these platforms tend to be exclusive for a certain kind of usage. It is also worth mentioning that although you can share these results in several ways today, it’s vital to note the accessibility of each platform as well. Some available options might not provide a digital object identifier to your work, which is essential for citing a piece of research. Others could lack open access, which allows easy access to scientific data. Similarly, some journals might not be indexed on platforms like PubMed or Scopus. Hence, a thorough review of platforms while sharing the results of your failed experiments could reap further benefits.
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