I think this is part of jumpstarting curiosity as a motivating force in academia, most especially in the humanities, which often seem to me to be so uncurious in their spirit.

Both of the former create stacks of the latter. We are all of us, independent of field and profession, overwhelmed with open questions. Any given one might be on the scale of an easy homework problem, or could grow to be a book or Ph.D. or career.

I’ve lately been asking my colleagues: So, how many of those open questions jotted in notebooks are you going to address before you’re dead? How many of us have time to do homework problems anymore, let alone the space in our careers for supernumerary Ph.D.-scale projects? We’re like parents, accumulating and preserving houses full of obsolete furniture, who expect their adult children to gleefully accept it and do something with it all when we’re downsizing or dead. They should value it all, because we’ve kept it so nice for them….

Though those children have their own very nice, more modern furniture already.

There’s not just a need for negative results. There’s a need to pass along unaddressed questions as well. A need to consider what we are going to do with them, and whether we want the credit if they’re addressed… or if they’re just questions we’d like to hear an answer to.

(And, apropos of the Shakespeare question: Sounds like a candidate for this conference.)

So, what do I mean? Consider Shakespeare. All his plays are divided into 5 acts. But those divisions were added by later editors; they aren’t Shakespeare’s work. So lets drop all those divisions and take another look at those texts. I simply want to divide them into parts according to the flow of dramatic action. Scene divisions are given by entrances and exits of characters, so that’s a level of organization given in the text. I figure there’s a level or two between that and the whole text. Let’s figure it out.

Not rocket science. But when it’s done we might begin to learn something about how the plays work.

Are you, perhaps, impatient? It’s one thing to say that the negative results never appear, and another to say that there’s a lag time because they’re not sexy. If the latter, then we get closer to the truth eventually, and it’s more a cause for eye-rolling than teeth-grinding; a venial rather than a mortal sin.

My first paper, published in 1988, was essentially a negative result. Of course we didn’t write it up like that, we wrote it up as “Such and such effect is important for parameter ranges X, Y, and Z.” The negative part was that those parameter ranges were out of the region of interest to the wider community, so we were essentially saying that the effect we were studying was unimportant for all practical purposes. (Of course, this could change in the future.)

Somewhat ironically, this paper is the most cited of my career, with 60 citations to date, the most recent in April 2006. It pretty consistently gets 2-3 citations every year, by a wide range of researchers. (I don’t work in that area anymore.) Almost all the citations are of the form “As was shown in [Ref] effect blah blah is unimportant for this study.” So it apparently was a useful result, even if it was a disappointing finding at the time.