Using blogs for sharing negative results

I’ve now been blogging for a little over three years. I’m no longer a newbie, but clearly am not an old-timer. Nonetheless, I’ve seen the standard topics of the scientific “blogosphere” (for lack of a better word) get cycled through again, and again. These are topics that are often important to our community, dealing with equity, justice, accessibility, and leadership. That said, I feel like blogs can do more, and serve our own academic communities better.

For the most part, blogs are preaching to the converted, aside for the uncommon post that penetrates outside the community. (Moreover, the posts that do break into new audiences usually are not about scientific outreach, but more likely some kind of outrage.) Blogs have specialized audiences. (The bulk of people who read this site work in colleges and universities and are interested in how we do things). The more we pretend that blogs are outreach to non-specialists — the people who wouldn’t normally be reading that particular blog  — the less focus we have on what blogs can do.

Some academic communities have a scene where a lot of people have blogs, and substantial academic issues get handled on those blogs in the form of a conversation. In ecology and its sister disciplines, that kind of scene doesn’t much exist, as Jeremy Fox has pointed out on in Dynamic Ecology on a number of occasions. (I make a point to avoid talking about detailed matters in ecology here on a regular basis, because the intended audience is broader.) We have a number of blogs in ecology, with various levels of activity, but folks generally don’t think of a blogs as a place where you put academic content. If you’ve got something to share with the world, and you’re not putting it in a peer-reviewed paper, then ‘blog’ isn’t something that comes to mind for most people.

The funny thing is, nearly everybody who is doing research has a lot of things that their fellow researchers would benefit from, if they had a blog and they discussed their research. I mean, discussed in a way that is useful for fellow researchers, not as a form of outreach. Some labs are very good about putting their protocols online, and sharing data, and all of that. But what about all those little things that you know that might be of use to others but aren’t quite substantial enough for a paper?

I’m thinking mostly about the ‘publication’ of negative results. That people can’t or don’t publish negative results is a frequent lament. It’s time to own that we don’t prioritize publishing negative results, or that journals aren’t keen on them either. (Aside from journals with ‘negative results’ in the title, obviously)

Imagine if we put our negative results in blogs. That we can tell our colleagues about. The world gets this information but without the rigamarole tied to publishing a peer-reviewed paper.

This means it’s not a line on your CV, but it wouldn’t be anyway.

The activation energy required for this is lower for people who already have blogs associated with their labs, or personal blogs. While I think having an infrequenly-updated blog isn’t a great idea, if the posts are primarily about the science itself, then this isn’t so bad.

Is anybody already publishing negative results on their blog? Any experiences to suggest that it might be useful to others?