The conduct of research has many components including ideas, protocol, experiments, collection of and analysis of data.....
While scientist endure months of hardships to conduct a research project; they are not currently awarded any credit for unpublishable/ or negative results.
Thank you Jan, I think both issues are noteworthy. As for negative results; whether they are unpublishable or unpublished, they are not only the product of hard work, they also represent significant contributions to science.
Thank you all for your contributions.
Wolfgang,
I can think of two answers to your question:
1. An impartial committee from the researcher's institution can evaluate his/her unpublished work for which the author is given some points.
Or
2. The researcher nominates peer reviewers who are contacted by the researcher's institution to assess the value of the unpublished work .
Because very few people read an know about published work; I suggest giving certain points (credit) for each assignment of a research project.
Jan,
Unpublished work can include any of the following :
1. A failed experiment
2. Studies with negative results
3. Studies impinging on others rights( trade secrets, industrial secrets....)
4. Results with findings of interest to a limited audience
5. Studies aiming at finding solutions within the research's institution or community
6. Longitudinal studies over an extended period of time
7. Studies examining the reproducibility of a published work
8. Incomplete studies due to lack of funding
................................................................................
I believe we can think of many many more examples of unpublished valuable work.
Dear Jan,
I would like to add another fundamental point, and that concerns those studies with unpublishable findings subject to certain limitations .
Thank you all for your questions and answers which enrich the discussion.
Thank you Jan,
But don't you agree that if researchers were rewarded for their unpublished work, there wouldn't be as much retractions of flawed articles and as much publications with flawed statistics.......?
In other words, which is better, publish a failed experiment and contaminate the literature, or admit mistakes and keep it in your drawer?
All efforts must be made to publish the results kept in drawers (as prof Kamal said), many literature piles up in drawers and after years we are unable even to understand it. Publishing these backlog research results need to be encouraged and promoted, and atleast be taken care of in our some lean research time / period and preferentially in a team way. Publications and published research is seen and followed by many and unpublished literature is by its custodian only (limited visibility in reports/thesis etc). Negative results can always pay way to ideas that could counter this issue and solve the problem, I have seen nowadays even few journals publishing only negative results.
For past 3 years I emptied some of my drawers and published many papers out of unpublished research results kept pending.
Journal of Negative Results
jnr-eeb.org
Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine
http://www.jnrbm.com/about
www.jnrbm.com
Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results
hahahahahaha... this already the situation in Arab countries. You can took too much credits without publishing in impacted Journals. I met too much professors who never published one paper in impacted journals. We need a revolution in science. Hope no coups from pimps.
Dr. Essam,
Can you please disambiguate your statement " no coups from pimps" , and clarify its relevance to the question being discussed?
This is a very good question Aceil.Firstly ,researchers are never call to defend their work before there are been publish.However no one ,except very few cases will be applauded for a good work not publish. To my opinion credit should be given to unpublished work only if the work has an impact on the society or our environment in a positive way.
The answer depends heavily on what is meant by unpublished.
Grisha Perelman received credit for his results on the geometrization conjecture and Poincare conjecture that were posted in the preprint repository arXiv.org but were never published in a journal.
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