While on vacation in California, I was having a discussion with my wife (an atmospheric scientist), and a friend (an archaeologist). I am a Developmental Geneticist. So we were three scientists from three very disparate fields. I have been a scientist for 20 years. My wife for much shorter time and my friend for much, much longer. So we come at it from different chronological perspectives.
And one thing we each have encountered is the huge lack in science of the reporting of negative results. There is a perception in science that one must prove your hypothesis correct or it is not worth reporting. So when someone posits a hypothesis and DISPROVES it (which is common and healthy in science) they cannot publish it until it can be paired with related positive data. That often doesn't happen for years and sometimes is never published if the work goes in a different direction. This, of course, leads to many people repeating the same negative data over and over because they are unaware that it has already been disproven already by many other researchers.
This can be quite a waste of time and resources.
Personally, my own unpublished negative results could have saved others much time. Long after I had left one lab I worked in, a guest speaker outlined a long, difficult set of experiments that had dead ended. My former boss remembered I had done something similar and went to my notebooks to look it up. He and the guest speaker went through my old, unpublished work with largely negative data, in some detail and saw that I had done what the guest speaker had done many years ago.
The guest speaker commented, "If you had published this, it would have saved me so much work."
(I should add that even publishing positive results can be hard...my first job in research yielded results that have been quoted in classes I have taken as "unpublished data," but since no one was around to finish the last details after I left to go to grad school, it never got published).
There is no easy way to publish this kind of negative data no matter how well done. Journals are just not interested in it. This perpetuates an inefficient way of doing research where scientists in most fields have to repeat eachother's negative data over and over again because no one ever hears of it.
This applies to biology, climate science and archaeology...and probably almost every other scientific field.
To me there is an obvious solution. What scientists need is something like a "Journal of Negative Results." It should be peer reviewed with just as stringent requirements as any other scientific journal, but be intended for results that people have that they feel won't be included in other publications that could be of use to other scientists. There already is a "Journal of Irreproducible Results," which is kind of like "The Onion" of science. Surely there could be a Journal of Negative Results that could play a genuine scientific purpose and actually streamline the way science is done!
My wife actually knows some bigwigs in her field who are already sympathetic to this kind of idea and have the stature to possible start it. She may mention the idea to them. In my field I find there already is a journal, not well known it seems from my experience, called the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine. Too bad they didn't exist when I was in that lab where I had some excellent negative results...even if it had been, I am not sure this journal would have been on my radar, and I have not seen this journal come up ever when I have been doing PubMed searches. It seems an underused resource!
I also find a Journal of Negative Results in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. I do not know enough about this field to judge if it is well used or not.
I think this has to be a wider used and respected way of publishing in cases where negative results can't be bundled together with positive results.