Well put! Similar problems certainly arise in physics. Your observation is a good reminder that the peer-review process has significant weaknesses in it, and that those weaknesses aren’t addressed as much as they should be. “Outsiders” fail to realize, however, that those flaws are not necessarily evidence of a grand conspiracy as much as evidence of the human side of science.

I’m afraid to ask about the ‘great international nematode conspiracy’! (GINC?)

Very true. There’s also a third factor at play here that the conspiracy theorists are likely to ignore (in part because it is admittedly a fine point to anyone who is not trying to maintain a career in research): the built-in bias of a peer-review process that requires manuscripts to “significantly advance the field” to be publishable. This is usually interpreted by editors and referees as “show something new to be likely true” and only rarely as “rule out some obvious possibilities or widely-held assumptions.”

I can’t speak for other disciplines, but in the biological sciences it’s tough to get negative data into print regardless of whether the study addresses the clinical relevance of a drug or the developmental pathways of a nematode. So some studies which fail to show positive results with drugs are probably disappearing not for nefarious reasons, but because nobody is interested in spending ink on them when they could be publishing something more exciting.

This phenomenon wastes a lot of research time and money, actually, as several labs will often pursue experiments that already didn’t work but were not published because no journal wanted the negative data.

Don’t get me started on the great international nematode conspiracy.