The QUEST 1,000 € NULL Results Award

Traditionally there is a strong bias against results that did not confirm or support the hypothesis researchers set out to test. Such results are called NULL results (as the Null hypothesis was not rejected), and rarely get published (‘file drawer phenomenon’) and are therefore lost to the scientific community. NULL results of well performed studies are important for many reasons. Due to the current bias towards ‘positive results’ aggregation of the available literature in systematic reviews overestimate the efficacy of drugs or effect sizes of biological phenomena. Knowing about ‘blind alleys’ and ‘dead ends’ may prevent others from repeating experiments unnecessarily. And surprising to many, NULL results are more informative than ‘positive’ results. Their positive and negative predictive values are much higher than those of results that support our hypotheses (for details see here, and here). 

Until a decade ago or so it was almost impossible to publish NULL results, unless they refuted a spectacular claim. Fortunately, this has changed, and numerous journals now publish results of sound studies regardless of their outcome (negative, inconclusive), such as F1000Res, PeerJ, PlosONE and many more. Incidentally, all these journals publish Open Access (see also our Open Access Publication Fund).