Negative results are disappearing from most disciplines and countries

By Daniele Fanelli. 2011

1,070 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Statistics and Probability

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Citations in the corpus

Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries (2019, background): “There is an unfortunate bias against the publication of negative results (Fanelli, 2012)—e.g., describing failures to reproduce an existing result, approaches that did not deliver the expected results, like the features that did not improve a classiﬁer performance, or algorithms that failed to…”
An open investigation of the reproducibility of cancer biology research (2014, neutral): “Across disciplines, most published studies demonstrate positive results—results that indicate an expected association between variables or a difference between experimental conditions ( Sterling, 1959 ; Fanelli, 2010 , 2012 ).”
An Agenda for Open Science in Communication (2020, background): “In conclusion, although the extent to which manuscripts with null findings are rejected is not known, publication bias leads to an overrepresentation of both significant findings and inflated effect sizes (Fanelli, 2012).”
Correcting for Bias in Psychology: A Comparison of Meta-Analytic Methods (2019, background): “This becomes evident when one considers that, in the field of psychology/psychiatry, more than 90% of all published hypothesis tests are significant (Fanelli, 2011) despite the average power being estimated as around 35% (Bakker, van Dijk, & Wicherts, 2012).”
Reducing Implicit Prejudice (2013, background): “Achieving a positive result – i.e., demonstrating that a manipulation changes implicit evaluation – is a de facto requirement for publication (Fanelli, 2010, 2012; Greenwald, 1975; Meehl, 1978; Nosek, Spies, & Motyl, 2012; Sterling, Rosenbaum, & Weinkam, 1995).”
Intended and unintended consequences of a publish-or-perish culture: A worldwide survey (2012, background): “The advent of this publish-or-perish culture has been discussed and criticized by scholars in various disciplines (e.g., Anderson, Ronning, De Vries & Martinson, 2007; Adler & Harzing, 2009; Bornmann 2011; Fanelli, 2011; Feller, 2002; Frey & Eichenberger, 1997, Frey, 2010).”
Three ways to make replication mainstream (2017, background): “Such replications contribute to a better estimate of effect sizes which are currently often overestimated due to publication bias, sampling error, or p-hacking (Fanelli 2011; Ferguson & Brannick 2012; Szucs & Ioannidis, 2017).”
The Chrysalis Effect (2017, background): “As such, management, like other sciences, may be experiencing a suboptimal rise in the number of supported hypotheses as unsupported hypotheses all but disappear from the literature (Fanelli, 2012).”
Editorial: Evidence on Questionable Research Practices: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (2016, background): “• When looking across time, Fanelli (2012) found that, from 1990 to 2007, there was a 22 % increase in significant findings in research studies.”
Facts Are More Important Than Novelty (2014, methodology): “This method is similar to what has previously been used when searching the publication histories of large databases (e.g., Fanelli, 2010, 2012; Makel et al., 2012).”
P-curve: a key to the file-drawer. (2014, neutral): “The funnel plot’s fill-and-trim procedure does, but it is only valid if publication bias is affected only by effect size, not by statistical significance (Duval & Tweedie, 2000), even though in many disciplines, including psychology, publication bias operates primarily through statistical significan”
Rethinking Reproducibility as a Criterion for Research Quality (2018, background): “…to smoothen bias and exclude uncomfortable results (e.g. the practice of p-hacking and selective reporting; Simmons, Nelson and Simonsohn 2011, Fanelli 2012); and lack of transparency and effective critical debate around research methods and data, which makes it impossible for researchers…”
How Trustworthy Is the Scientific Literature in Industrial and Organizational Psychology? (2013, background): “Furthermore, although there is an increase over time in the percentage of confirmed hypotheses, particularly in U.S. journals, the growth is strongest in psychology (Fanelli, 2012).”
Determinants of citation impact: A comparative analysis of the Global South versus the Global North (2017, background): “…behaviours, including a shift towards English publications (Hicks et al., 2015), diversion of research away from local or national issues (Hicks et al., 2015), scientific supply poorly aligned with societal needs (Sarewitz and Pielke, 2007) and bias toward positive reporting (Fanelli, 2011), etc.”