We are pleased to announce the winners of the ASAPbio competition ‘Make your negative result a preprint winner’, which aimed to highlight the value of sharing negative and inconclusive scientific results via preprints.
We know that science advances through a persistent exploration of research questions and approaches, and that this brings with it the fact that some results will not confirm the original hypothesis and that methods will often require troubleshooting. Still, when we look at journal publications, it is rare to find articles reporting negative results. However, those negative results are valuable data for the community to avoid repetition of dead ends, or to correct methodologies or phenomena that do not work as previously reported. Preprints can help tackle publication bias as they allow researchers to share all of their results with the community, including negative and inconclusive results.
Organized by a group of 2022 ASAPbio Fellows, the competition aimed to reward preprints that reported negative, null or inconclusive results as the main finding in the paper. We invited preprints posted since the beginning of the 2022 in any field of experimental or computational biology, and which had appeared as a preprint prior to publication in a journal.
Following review of the entries by our judges Beth Evans (University of California, Irvine), James Fraser (University of California, San Francisco), Kanika Khanna (University of California, Berkeley), Ksenia Kuznetsova (Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics), Thabiso Motaung (University of Pretoria), Dyche Mullins (University of California, San Francisco) and Nandakumar Narayanan (University of Iowa), we are pleased to announce the three preprint winners:
The winners
Lilya Andrianova, Steliana Yanakieva, Gabriella Margetts-Smith, Shivali Kohli, Erica S Brady, John P Aggleton, Michael T Craig. bioRxiv 2022.01.25.477805; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.25.477805
M.A. Hanson, B. Lemaitre. bioRxiv 2022.08.24.504952; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.08.24.504952
Livia D. Songster, Devahuti Bhuyan, Jenna R. Christensen, Samara L. Reck-Peterson. bioRxiv 2023.01.20.524968; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.01.20.524968
Celebrating the value of negative results
We received entries from different disciplines and reporting both negative and inconclusive results. The competition entries highlight the versatility of preprints to communicate different types of results and we thank all participants for sharing their work openly with the community through preprints. We are grateful to all participants for their interest, and extend our congratulations to the winners!
We want to celebrate these negative results and we will be talking to the authors about their preprints in a series of posts. Stay tuned for our upcoming posts where we’ll learn more about the research behind each of the preprints and why the authors chose to preprint their results.
The Null Hypothesis Initiative
The Center for Biomedical Research Transparency (CBMRT) is a 501 (c)(3) not-for-profit focused on helping patients, doctors, and researchers by ensuring that all medical research results – including negative, inconclusive, and confirmatory results – are made discoverable in the scientific literature either as peer-reviewed publications or preprints. The CBMRT’s Null Hypothesis Initiative is a project focused on getting the most out of our research efforts. CBMRT would like to feature more preprints reporting negative or null results on nullhypothesis.com. If you would like your preprint to appear on the Null Hypothesis website, please email Development@cbmrt.org to submit your contact details and someone from the Null Hypothesis initiative will be in touch to help.
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