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Record W4414462560 · doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3003368

Ending publication bias: A values-based approach to surface null and negative results

2025· article· en· W4414462560 on OpenAlexaff
Stephen Curry, Eunice Mercado-Lara, Virginia Arechavala‐Gomeza, C. Glenn Begley, C. Bernard, René Bernard, Stefano Bertuzzi, Needhi Bhalla, Dawn Bowers, Samuel Brod, Chris Chambers, Michael R. Dougherty, Yensi Flores Bueso, Stefânia Forner, Alexandra L. J. Freeman, Magali Haas, Darla P. Henderson, Kanika Khanna, Rebecca Lawrence, Kifayathullah Liakath‐Ali, Christine Liu, Neil Malhotra, José G. Merino, Edward Miguel, Rachel Miles, Mary Munson, Shinichi Nakagawa, Robert Nobles, Joy Owango, Michel Tuan Pham, Gina R. Poe, Sarvenaz Sarabipour, Jill L. Silverman, Laura N. Smith, P. Sriramarao, Paul W. Sternberg, Geeta K. Swamy, Malú G. Tansey, Gonzalo E. Torres, Erick H. Turner, Lauren von Klinggraeff, Frances Weis‐Garcia

Bibliographic record

VenuePLoS Biology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicAcademic Publishing and Open Access
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
FundersNational Institute of Neurological Disorders and StrokeNational Institute of General Medical SciencesU.S. Department of Health and Human ServicesNational Institutes of HealthLilly EndowmentMichael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's ResearchNational Institute on AgingEli Lilly and Company
KeywordsPublicationPublishingScientific publishingPublication biasNull (SQL)Null hypothesis

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Sharing knowledge is a basic tenet of the scientific community, yet publication bias arising from the reluctance or inability to publish negative or null results remains a long-standing and deep-seated problem, albeit one that varies in severity between disciplines and study types. Recognizing that previous endeavors to address the issue have been fragmentary and largely unsuccessful, this Consensus View proposes concrete and concerted measures that major stakeholders can take to create and incentivize new pathways for publishing negative results. Funders, research institutions, publishers, learned societies, and the research community all have a role in making this an achievable norm that will buttress public trust in science.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.520
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.717
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: Reporting · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.480
Threshold uncertainty score0.592

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.5200.717
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0030.003
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0050.007
Bibliometrics0.0210.010
Science and technology studies0.0080.046
Scholarly communication0.0260.024
Open science0.0120.022
Research integrity0.0160.019
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0150.004

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.184
GPT teacher head0.419
Teacher spread0.235 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
DomainReporting
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations8
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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