There needs to be a journal called "Failures" that focuses exclusively on failed experiments and unreproducible results. I'm far more interested in learning why something may have gone wrong.
Maybe it's just me but I feel it would surprise many people with its popularity.
> The biotech company Amgen Inc. and prominent biochemist Bruce Alberts have created a new online journal that aims to lift the curtain on often hidden results in biomedicine: failed efforts to confirm other groups’ published papers. Amgen is seeding the publication with reports on its own futile attempts to replicate three studies in diabetes and neurodegenerative disease and hopes other companies will follow suit.
> The contradictory results—along with successful confirmations—will be published by F1000Research, an open-access, online-only publisher. Its new “Preclinical Reproducibility and Robustness channel,” launched today, will allow both companies and academic scientists to share their replications so that others will be less likely to waste time following up on flawed findings, says Sasha Kamb, senior vice president for research at Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California.
Who would read this? I skim Nature, Science, and some journals in my particular subfield every week/month because I am sure I will find something relevant to my research or generally interesting. With the exception of some hilarious or spectacular ones, I don't think Failures would be so engaging, so the only way I would find an article in Failures is if I specifically set out to search for it.
I might do that (though searching by technique is hard), but even if I found something, read it, and decided it was helpful, what would I do with it? For better or worse, citations are the currency of academia and academic publishing. Where would I cite a paper that specifically warned me away from a possible project? "Dear Nature, I was going to study XZY via ABC, but [1] indicates that's a dead end."
So, with no regular readers and no citations, Failures becomes more like a database than a journal. There currently aren't any good incentives to submit things to databases, so Failures becomes a....failure.
"There has been some promising research with alternative technique X, but that has shown to be unreliable. [1] Because of this and [other factors], we have decided on technique Y."
Maybe it's just me but I feel it would surprise many people with its popularity.