Being Positive about the Negative…
 
As part of Elsevier, SSRN’s Product and Content teams are committed to doing what we can to support research integrity, so we’ve been exploring ways to encourage authors across different disciplines to share negative and null results from their experiments and research – and today we’re delighted to announce the launch of a new Special Topic Hub for Negative and Null Results.

This article on Elsevier Connect, “Why it’s time to publish research “failures”, provides some great context on the importance of sharing negative results to mitigate the bias in research towards positive results. For SSRN, negative results – in which an experiment fails or a hypothesis is proven false – are an important part of the scholarly record. By helping others avoid repeating your negative results, sharing research failures saves the wider research community valuable time and resources. However, negative results tend to attract less interest than positive results and are often hard to place in peer reviewed journals and other scientific platforms in which people are looking for new results that will make a splash and have high impact. This means interesting or useful negative results may not get the exposure they deserve.

We’ve been polling authors on SSRN and via our social media channels about the importance of negative results, and we have received lots of interest in making it easier to share research with negative results; the majority of people we polled said that it was important to share negative results as they’re an important part of the scientific record.

We’ve launched the new Negative Results Special Topic Hub, organised by scientific discipline, as part of a experiment to see what happens when we provide a new home for authors who want to share their negative and null results with us.

We’re going to be tracking papers volumes and exploring different ways to market the hub to different scholarly communities.

If you have negative or null results you’d like to share with us, please access our Negative Results Submission Portal and send us your work: we’ve love to have it. If you have any ideas or thoughts you’d like to share you can send us email at ideas@ssrn.com

You can submit your research at the Negative and Null Results Submission Portal

You can check out our Negative and Null Researchs research in the Negative and Null Results Special Topic Hub