Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A paper reporting that a candidate drug showed no effect on the primary outcome in a well-powered trial
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A paper reporting a small p > 0.05 finding spun as 'a trend toward significance' is not honest negative-result reporting
Editorial commentary
A negative-result paper is a peer-reviewed publication whose primary finding is that a tested hypothesis was not supported — an intervention did not produce the predicted effect, or an expected relationship was not observed — framed explicitly as a contribution to the evidence base rather than as a failed study. Publishing negative results deliberately counters publication bias: the well-documented tendency (the “file drawer problem,” Rosenthal, 1979) for studies with statistically significant, positive findings to be submitted and accepted at far higher rates than studies that found nothing.
How this differs from a null-result publication
The two terms overlap heavily but are conceptually distinct: a null-result publication emphasises the statistical framing specifically — a result that fails to reject the null hypothesis at a pre-specified threshold, or falls within a pre-specified equivalence margin — while “negative result” is the broader, less statistically precise term covering any unsupported hypothesis, including qualitative or mechanistic findings that were not primarily framed around a significance test. Some venues, such as the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, and broad-scope journals like PLOS ONE that review on methodological soundness rather than novelty, exist specifically to give negative results a publication home.
Example
A paper reporting that a candidate drug produced no measurable effect on its pre-specified primary outcome in a well-powered, well-conducted trial — published as a genuine, informative contribution rather than left in the file drawer.
What it is not
A paper that finds no significant effect but then reframes the story around a secondary outcome that happened to reach significance is engaging in outcome-switching (a form of HARKing), not honest negative-result reporting — the framing has to follow the pre-specified design, not be reverse-engineered from whatever turned out significant.
Also known as
Negative findings paper · Failed-replication paper
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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