What would you say if an oil company said it wanted to invest in alternative energy research but the cost was too much so it needed public financing - but wanted no accountability or timeframes or an expectation of results?

You'd be skeptical of the papers they produce because they have every incentive to perpetuate the model and only produce positive results.  Leaders in the scientific research  have put scientists in that very position; more research needs to be taxpayer-funded, proponents claim, because the private sector won't do basic research, and in order to maintain that we have to keep it positive.

A review by the University of Edinburgh says good research is in peril because of growing pressures to report only positive results.  The researchers examined over 4,600 scientific research papers published between 1990 and 2007 and found a steady decline in studies in which the findings contradicted scientific hypotheses. 

Papers that report null or negative findings are in principle as useful as positive ones, but they attract fewer readers and citations, so peer-reviewed journals tend to reject them, and science media groups and researchers that have gotten lazy relying on NSF funding for outreach haven't tried to create a private-sector approach.  A researcher is unlikely to pay part of their budget to appear in an open-access journal to show a failed approach that might actually help a competitor.

The problem is more scientists.  We may read persistent complaints that even more money than the nearly $5 billion spent on STEM programs is 'essential' to improve the 'dismal' state of science education but the data show otherwise; there are far more PhDs each year than can be employed in research and the problem in more 'group think' results might be worsening because competition in science is growing and jobs and grants are given to scientists who publish frequently in high-ranking journals. Many researchers, therefore, have speculated that scientists will increasingly pursue predictable outcomes and produce positive results through re-interpretation, selection or even manipulation of data.

The study examined research papers in which a hypothesis had been tested, in various scientific disciplines. Over the period studied, positive results grew from around 70 per cent in 1990 to 86 per cent in 2007. The growth was strongest in economics, business, clinical medicine, psychology, psychiatry, pharmacology and molecular biology.

The findings, published in Scientometrics, also show that papers reporting positive results are more frequent in the US than in Europe.

Dr Daniele Fanelli of the University's Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation, who led the study, said, "Without negative evidence in the literature, scientists might mis-estimate the importance of phenomena and waste resources replicating failed studies. The higher frequency of US papers reporting positive findings may suggest that problems linked to competition are greater in the US than elsewhere."