Exploring the bibliometric and semantic nature of negative

Overview & Synopsis

Scientific progress in some disciplines is hampered by researchers' tendencies to bin negative results. However, their publication is beneficial in order to prevent duplication of effort, save public money and to facilitate and promote scientific communication and progress. A bibliometric analysis of negative results literature was performed in order to identify their most important attributes, to study their outcome and to explore their hidden relationships, focussing on the distribution of publications openly declared as containing negative results and published in journals completely devoted to this kind of publications. The Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine (JNRBM) was used as a role model, since all the other relevant journals are not indexed in the largest citation databases. In order to evaluate the prestige of this journal, the impact factor as well as the new alternative indicators SJR and SNIP were looked up for all assigned categories. The complete article records of JNRBM, the number of citations and the citation percentiles & averages were retrieved from Scopus and Web of Knowledge to generate an impact profile