‘Negative Results’ Are Still Results: Why it’s okay, even important, to fail in research
Dr Ankit Sharma
DM Onco-Anesthesia (AIIMS, New Delhi)
Bio: Writer is the author of the non-fiction humour book ‘Chhoti-Chhoti Magar Khoti Baatein’. He has written two more books in the fiction-fantasy genre, lovingly titled ‘MD dissertation’ and ‘DM dissertation’.
It’s a new era of sorts in the medical universe. An era where you are considered an expert in your field only if:
A. You have an Instagram page with a few thousand followers, and/or
B. You publish a lot of ‘research’ papers.
Lame reasons such as being perceived as ‘jealous’ shall prevent me from talking about point A. Point B is the focal point for this article.
Why is there a rat race for getting published in the first place? There are many answers, like better professional résumé, prospective job opportunities, bragging rights, etc. and all of it risks making it into a ‘mine is bigger than yours (research profile)’ competition. It also gives rise to a horrifying term. The one which must not be named.
‘Bias’.
Specifically, publication bias, where the results are tweaked in order to make it seem ground-breaking and as a result, more lucrative to the journals to publish them. You’d think of the obvious things like how dangerous it is to the medical world, especially clinical medicine, that wrong reports are pushed into records and enough of them may alter clinical practice by being a part of meta analysis. But I’m here to state the obvious, and then some more. It’s not just dangerous, it’s stupid as well.
Being partial to studies which give ‘positive results’, or tampering with the result to make it look positive, is simply stupid. New is NOT always better. If Amitabh Bachchan and Abhishek Bachchan were not the most widely accepted examples of this, we also have a newer and subjectively more apparent example of Aishwarya Rai and Nimrat Kaur. For that matter, even Snapchat came much later, but is it a useful app? Maybe to those who are able to understand the purpose and functions of the app, but that is mostly gen Z youth who use stupid slang like slay, cray and drip.
Let’s consider a detailed, non-Bollywood analogy. Let’s imagine a scenario where a researcher sets out to test a hypothesis of chocolate momos being better than regular momos. Pressed with publication bias, the researcher may try to prove that at least a subset of people – dare I say, intellectually unstimulated people, for example those who watch Bigg Boss OTT for entertainment – actually find them better, but is that a valid or useful finding? Why are we even trying to extract favourable data out of thin air, while we should be working on a petition for the government to take away the voting rights of people who like chocolate momos and/or watch Bigg Boss?
Major responsibility also lies with the Editorial teams of journals. They need to publish studies based on merit of quality, and not results. Their goal must be to validate high quality researches, and not assist in promotion of authors to Editor-in-chiefs of lesser-known journals based out of Chinchpokli, Mumbai or Karkardooma, New Delhi. Publishing negative studies will save someone else the headache of doing the same study, reaching the same original conclusion and then faking the data to match the tweaked result. Blame political corruption all you want, but at least it achieves something, no matter how amoral. Data tweaking is the most laughable method of corruption.
An honest researcher’s approach towards a study should, ideally, be like my approach towards my crush in my first year of MBBS – there’s always no, but what if it’s a yes? Yes is just a hypothesis. No should not be disheartening. Falsifying data and then getting published rewards mediocrity and falsehood. In clinical medicine, it wastes money on new drugs and modalities without any actual advantage.
For any study, there can be three outcomes. One positive, one negative, and one – “what do you want it to be?”. But remember, it’s a research, not a bedroom role-playing exercise. Pre-existing bias in research, especially in medicine, is akin to nepotism in politics. At best, it is harmless, but at worst, a whole nexus is trying to prove a disinterested middle-aged politician as a beacon-of-hope youth leader.
Listening to ‘Elahi’ song on a volume loud enough that others can hear you in the local train despite earphones, and going to a hill station once every two years to post 200 photos on Instagram does not make you a ‘nomadic traveller’. Lots of published papers means similar in terms of you calling yourself a ‘researcher’. Quality over quantity every day of the week, and twice on the day of a job interview.
While we’re at it, can we please stop using ‘conundrum’ in our research article titles? It’s been overused to the limit of abuse, many of us haven’t watched The Big Bang Theory reruns enough number of times to appreciate it, and no one will call you Shashi Tharoor anyway.
