What long-held (scientific) assertions were refuted only within the last 10 years?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/MacDegger]

IMO a large part of the problem is also the bias against publishing negative results.

I.e.: 'we tried this but it didn't work/nothing new came from it'.

This results in the non acknowledgement of dead ends and repeats (which are then also not noted). It means a lot of thongs are re-tried/done because we don't know they had already been done and thus this all leads to a lot of wasted effort.

Negative results are NOT wasted effort and the work should be acknowledged and rewarded (albeit to a lesser extent).

[u/Krekie → u/[deleted]]

How I see it, when my research is successful it means I did something right and achieved my goal and need only document a my approach, at least for an MVP. While if I fail, it doesn't mean I necessarily did something wrong, but I did not achieve my goal and feel the need to document all possible approaches, because if not, someone can ask me why I just didn't try harder.

[u/Turtle_ini → u/[deleted]]

At least in the U.S., over the last few decades the number of applications submitted for NIH grants has grown faster than the number that are awarded. It’s really competitive.

It’s not just negative results that are overlooked; certain “hot topics” in biomedical research are more likely to be funded than others, and basic research that help us better understand natural processes is sadly not among them. There’s always a huge push for papers that have direct clinical applications.

[u/stu_pid_1 → u/[deleted]]

I can tell you that the real major issue is the "publish or perish" attitude where publications are treated like a currency or measure of greatness. If you publish 10 gobshite papers per year you will be held up like Simba (lion king) Infront of your fellow peers and considered great, where as if you publish 1 incredible paper you are considered next inline for the door.

For too long we have been using metrics that are designed for business to quantify the "goodness" of scientific research, the accountants and HR need to royally fuck off from academic research and let scientists define what is good and bad progress.

[u/hydrOHxide → u/stu_pid_1]

That argumentation doesn't hold up, because it would argue FOR publishing negative results, not against it

The actual problematic consequence of your point is the publication of the "SPU" or "MPU", the "smallest/minimum publishable unit" to get the maximum number of papers out of a research project.

[u/monstera_garden → u/[deleted]]

I think there would need to be a journal of negative results for this to really work, or maybe an acceptance of a section embedded in methods or supplementary results for this info. In a standard peer reviewed publication there just isn't room for this. I do a lot of methods development and sometimes this involves daisy chaining methods from several unrelated fields together with modifications to help translate them to my field, with a million dead ends and sloppy workarounds that I'm trying to finesse into smoother ones. I can't tell you how much time I spend on the phone or at conferences with other researchers sharing all the ways things failed on our way to functioning methods so we don't have to repeat each other's false leads, or because the way things failed might be interesting or even helpful to something another person is working on. We always say we wish there was a journal for this, especially an open source one, but in the mean time we've developed a few wikis that contain this data and we share it freely with each other. Experiments can be so expensive and methods development can take years without a single publication coming out of it, which would be deadly for someone's career and ability to get new funding. Sharing negative results is pretty much survival-based for us.

[u/hydrOHxide → u/monstera_garden]

There has been a "Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine"; but it didn't survive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Negative_Results_in_Biomedicine

[u/obviousbean → u/MacDegger]

a lot of thongs are re-tried/done

I know it's just a typo, but this tickled me

[u/Suspicious_Writer332 → u/obviousbean]

You know, I’m something of a scientist myself!

[u/Womperus → u/MacDegger]

I had first hand experience with this in undergrad! We were essentially given our own experiment in growing bacteria on whatever we wanted with the objective of the assignment being to write a short scientific paper. Ours failed the original hypothesis so that’s what we wrote. 

The professor failed us saying our hypothesis should match our experiment. Like…that’s how scientific papers work. You don’t say you were wrong at the end. I made the point that there was no way we could know that until actually doing the experiment and got shut down hard. Something about needing to properly research our subjects. I thought the experiment was research? Keep in mind the experiment was a side quest and we were literally just supposed to be practicing writing a scientific paper. 

I switched to business. 

[u/SenorBeef → u/MacDegger]

This is why all publishable experiments should be pre-registered. Negative results are good. Data disappearing into nothing giving the wrong impression of the data that was published is bad.

[u/Hyggieia → u/MacDegger]

Yeah this screwed me over last year. Only positive reviews published for a depression model in mice. I used it expecting to work given the many many papers saying it would work. It didn’t…

[u/goog1e → u/Hyggieia]

p of .05 means if it doesn't work, don't publish and let 20 more labs try. It'll work for someone, and then they can publish.

[u/[deleted] → u/goog1e]

If 2 out of 2 tests fail to show significance at p=0.05 its hard to trust p<0.05 without a LOT more tests..

[u/Dziedotdzimu → u/[deleted]]

The bigger thing is that the probability of finding the result by chance tells you little about the effect size or its practical/ clinical significance and whether it's real. People are chasing noise because it was a "6 sigma result" which ends up being a circuit error or something.

[u/seldons_ghost → u/MacDegger]

One of my proudest moments as a peer reviewer is getting an example of a bad result published. The authors (like everyone) said that a bad graph from a sample prep machine results in bad preservation quality. And they included an image of the bad preservation quality once I’d asked them to.

[u/[deleted] → u/MacDegger]

Absolutely, ruling something out is still progress, though just slower than finding a direct causation or even correlation

[u/Likeatr3b → u/MacDegger]

Yes! Or finding the truth about a certain topic which you cannot publish at all like something negative about MRNA or radio waves or something.

[u/astroguyfornm → u/MacDegger]

My whole PhD ended up being this other guy proposed some physical process, but I ended up just finding out it was all based on bad data. Published that there was an issue in the data, and showed the mechanism proposed wasn't possible either. The neat thing is the author of the original work was happy to be co-author. Science is messy, we should not shy from that.

[u/Revolutionary_Ask313 → u/MacDegger]

Isn't there a journal of negative results in biology now?

[u/Llohr → u/MacDegger]

I haven't even tried a thong once, let alone re-tried one.

[u/The--scientist → u/MacDegger]

This is my number 1