Associate Professor Benjamin Walther at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi reflects on the value of getting a peer reviewed paper out of his research with negative results, while making a positive contribution to his field, boosting his publication record, and helping to secure additional funding to further his research.
Walther undertook a small scale, ecological, pilot project to try and understand the link between environmental dynamics and pathogen prevalence in oysters at two different sites. No difference was detected in these sites, so the result was negative, but still important because it provided valuable information about how these systems were working, helping to refine hypotheses for future work.

To make these results discoverable for other scientists, Walther published this research in Experimental Results, a Cambridge University Press journal designed specifically for accepting short format articles, including valid research with negative results. In Walther’s own words, “Getting a peer reviewed publication out of this study, even though we didn’t see what we expected, was important. It is a valuable contribution to the literature and a foundation for future work.”

Benefits of publishing your standalone research with negative results in Experimental Results

• Get credit for null, novel or reproducibility research.
• Make a positive contribution to your field.
• Boost your publication record.
• Improve career prospects.
• Build an honest, credible scientific record.

Publish valid negative results to secure additional funding to further research

As with many researchers, Walther is continually looking for funding to develop work in his field, so publishing research outputs is essential to his progression. “Having a peer reviewed report come out of the work, demonstrates to funders that you are using their funds appropriately and getting products out there that highlight what they are funding and supporting”, he explained. Having a publication that grant reviewers could access was also highly valuable when applying to other agencies to take the next step in his research.

This short format paper was quick and easy to write

Experimental Results is a multi-disciplinary journal which accepts short format papers, making it a relatively quick, painless paper to write. According to Walter, “The short format of the paper was helpful to streamline the extraneous information which made it a very straightforward paper to write.”

Proof of interdisciplinary collaboration

The Texas A&M University Corpus Christi encourages interdisciplinary collaboration in the interests of gaining more valuable research outputs and as it happened, this research project had been a collaborative effort between Professor Walther and his colleague at the university, Dr Paxton Bachand, specialising in Environmental Microbiology. “The paper was interdisciplinary; this gave me a product to point to as evidence of collaboration in my annual evaluation”.

Boosting career prospects

“Students working on the project were able to get school credit for this work and a peer reviewed publication out of it with their names as co-authors, which is incredibly valuable to them for their future careers.” This was yet another good thing to come out of publishing valid research with negative results.

About Experimental Results

Experimental Results is the home of standalone experiments including null, novel and replication

research, within the Cambridge University Press stable of journals. It is an open access journal providing a forum for experimental findings that disclose the small incremental steps, vitally important to experimental research; experiments and findings which have so far remained hidden. Such results often go unpublished due to the traditional scholarly communication process, in which only a select group of experiments are chosen to make up the narrative of a single paper.
Articles for consideration in Experimental Results include validation and reproducibility of existing findings, null results, supplementary findings, improvements or amendments to published results, as well as results that could be of importance, but for whatever reason, the researcher has not followed a particular line of questioning to produce a full narrative for a traditional paper.

Interview by Kin Maclachlan

Original publication:

Benjamin D. Walther, Paxton T. Bachand, Andrew Hinson, Colin A. O’Donnell and Jeffrey W. Turner
Investigating reconstructed inflows and pathogen infection patterns between low-relief and high-relief subtropical oyster reefs
Experimental Results, [03 August 2020, DOI: 10.1017/exp.2020.28]