I was recently informed by a science professor I know that journals do not publish papers that don't yield interesting results, and while I understand that journals would rather publish your paper on how you cured cancer than all the things you tried that didn't, I am ENRAGED by this idea.
If you don't publish the experiments that didn't yield interesting results, people are going to waste time repeating them because when they look in the database and see nothing published on them, they're going to assume the experiment hasn't been done???
And then my professor told me that scientists just "assume that if the experiment would be relatively easy to set up, but there's nothing published on it, that means someone has already done it with no significant results." WHAT? That means we could be assuming that important experiments have been done just because they seem to be too easy???
Not to mention that this also encourages people to fudge results towards significance for career advancement because no one wants to spend YEARS on a project they don't get any credit for.
This convention of the culture is DELAYING scientific progress, I guarantee it. Please let me be financially successful enough that I can start my own journal for publishing experiments with no significant results. I AM ANGRY AT THIS INEFFICIENCY.
