"Negative results do not make headlines."

Why bad ideas refuse to die

They may have been disproved by science or dismissed as ridiculous, but some foolish beliefs endure. In theory they should wither away – but it’s not that simple

"One reform suggested by many people to counteract publication bias would be to encourage the publication of more “negative findings” – papers where a hypothesis was not backed up by the experiment performed. One problem, of course, is that such findings are not very exciting. Negative results do not make headlines. (And they sound all the duller for being called “negative findings”, rather than being framed as positive discoveries that some ideas won’t fly.)

The publication-bias issue is even more pressing in the field of medicine, where it is estimated that the results of around half of all trials conducted are never published at all, because their results are negative. “When half the evidence is withheld,” writes the medical researcher Ben Goldacre, “doctors and patients cannot make informed decisions about which treatment is best.”Accordingly, Goldacre has kickstarted a campaigning group named AllTrials to demand that all results be published."