Publishing Negative Findings Posted on October 19, 2007 Publishing negative trials isn't easy, but it's important for your field, believes Lauren B. Marangell (bio).

You know, I’m not sure this is a good thing to say, but a lot of my studies have wound up negative, and so we’re faced with that. I think it’s tremendously important for the field that we know negative trials, not just trials that we know are negative and we need to know that so physicians don’t prescribe those drugs, but also if it was a failed trial in terms of methodology. We need to know that so that other people don’t replicate our mistakes. The problem is journals don’t wanna publish negative trials. It’s not sexy.

Industry does publish negative findings. Unfortunately, there’s not really an impetus to do that, and either from the journal end or from industry’s end, and so I’m very delighted to see things like clinicaltrials.gov, where we now know of all trials, and there now is more of an incentive to go ahead and publish the methodology that goes with negative trials.

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