Sir
Your News story “Journals submit to scrutiny of their peer-review process” (Nature 439, 252; 200610.1038/439252b) reports findings of no bias against manuscripts presenting negative results. But the journals examined in this study are at the top of their field, and top journals are only likely to receive submissions reporting negative results if these are of clear ‘positive’ interest. This is certainly the case in ecology: Julia Koricheva (Oikos 102, 397–401; 2003) showed that non-significant results in ecology tend to be published in lower-impact journals.
This filtering of results undoubtedly biases the information available to scientists (see, for example “Null and void” Nature 422, 554–555; 2003). And communication is at the heart of science.
If non-significant results remain unpublished, we will be left with only half the picture. We encourage scientists to submit the negative results of their rigorous research to journals such as the Journal of Negative Results — Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (http://www.jnr-eeb.org), the Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine (http://www.jnrbm.com), the Journal of Negative Observations in Genetic Oncology (http://www.path.jhu.edu/NOGO), and the Journal of Negative Results in Speech and Audio Sciences (http://journal.speech.cs.cmu.edu).
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O'Hara, B., Fowler, M. & Johnson, C. Why negatives should be viewed as positives. Nature 439, 782 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/439782a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/439782a