--- title: "296 Papers Accepted Before Anyone Saw A Result. Positives Fell To 39 Per Cent." dek: "We wrote to four hundred authors offering to publish their unpublished null result, free, with the data hosted here for good. Seventy-one said they had one. Nine sent files. The other sixty-two gave reasons, and we printed them." kind: analysis (Analysis) desk: Suppressed Science author: Dr. Ilse Vantongeren and Loretta Sung (fictional) published: 2026-08-22T07:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/accepted-before-the-result tags: registered reports, publication bias, replication, peer review, null results genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # 296 Papers Accepted Before Anyone Saw A Result. Positives Fell To 39 Per Cent. *We wrote to four hundred authors offering to publish their unpublished null result, free, with the data hosted here for good. Seventy-one said they had one. Nine sent files. The other sixty-two gave reasons, and we printed them.* Two hundred and ninety-six papers have been accepted for publication before anybody had seen a result. That is the entire intervention. A journal reads the question, the method and the analysis plan. It decides whether the study is worth doing. It commits in writing to print whatever comes out. Only then does the researcher run it. Across the twelve journals that operate the format, 39 per cent of those papers report the stated hypothesis supported. In the same twelve journals, in the same fields, in the same years, 15,014 papers reviewed the ordinary way report it supported 95 per cent of the time. > **Figure:** Positive results, by whether the journal had seen the result — see https://theyburied.com/article/accepted-before-the-result ## What the comparison is, and what it is not We matched on journal, on field and on year. We did not match on question, because nobody has a taxonomy of questions. That matters, and the editor whose reply runs at the foot of this page says so at length and is worth reading before anybody quotes the two numbers at each other. Registered reports attract replicators. Replications of famous claims come out flat more often than first looks at new ideas do. So 95 against 39 is a ceiling and a floor. It is not a fraud rate. The pale bars in the figure are not eight thousand lies. ## Then we tried to open the drawer The other half of the claim is that the flat results exist and are being held somewhere. We went looking. We took conference abstracts from 2016 to 2024 describing replication attempts, kept the ones that never became a paper, and wrote to four hundred of their authors with an offer: send us the null, we will publish it in full, at any length, at no cost, with your data hosted on this site permanently. We wrote twice, in February and again in May. Seventy-one replied to say they had one in a drawer. Nine sent files. All nine are published with this story, and one of them is a failed replication of a paper cited nine hundred times. Sixty-two said no, and gave a reason. ## The sixty-two reasons, counted Nineteen, in one form or another: *I cannot find the data because I never labelled it, because I did not think anyone would ever ask.* One sent a photograph of a shoebox of unmarked USB sticks. Eleven: the hard drive is lost, dead, or was thrown out in a lab move. Four of the eleven had looked. Two had not. Five did not answer when we asked. Nine: the postdoc who ran it has left science, and nobody else knows how the analysis worked. Six: consent or ethics approval has lapsed and sharing the data now would require a committee. Five: they intend to write it up this year. Three of those five told a colleague the same thing in 2019. Four: the co-author is now their head of department. Three cited pressure, or the expectation of displeasure, from a sponsor. Three, out of four hundred letters. Five gave a reason we could not classify, and their words are in the file rather than in a bucket. > I did not think anyone would ever ask. > > — from nineteen of the sixty-two replies ## Nine months, and nothing that counts The arithmetic came up in almost every reply that ran past two sentences. Turning a finished null result into a publishable manuscript takes something like nine months of evenings: the write-up, the reviewers, the revision, the data cleaning that was never done because nobody cleans data for a result they are not submitting. At the end of the nine months the author has a paper that a promotion committee does not count, a hiring panel does not read, and a citation index barely registers. None of this requires anyone to lean on anyone. It requires only that the reward for the nine months is zero, which it is, and has been for decades, and is the same arithmetic this desk found behind a cancer drug that nobody will fund because nobody can own it. The two papers in [[PX-2185]] — a claim and, five years later, the rerun that did not find it — remain unusual precisely because somebody spent the nine months. The pre-registered protocol in [[PX-2161]] is unusual for the opposite reason: it was published before recruitment, so the nine months were committed in advance and could not be quietly reclaimed. ## What this desk takes from it The file drawer is real and it has no lock on it. It is a drawer nobody has a reason to open, in an office where opening it is unpaid. That is a duller finding than the one people want, and it is worse, because a lock can be picked and an incentive has to be rebuilt. And we should be plain about our own part in it. We offered four hundred people the best terms in publishing — unlimited length, no fee, permanent hosting, a readership — and we got nine files. Our offer did not shorten the nine months. Nothing we can offer does. ## Sources (invented) - The registered-report archives of twelve journals, Published tables of contents, 2013–2025 — Compiled by hand over eleven weeks; every paper coded twice by two people working separately; the spreadsheet is published with this story (March–July 2026) - The matched comparison set, 15,014 conventionally reviewed papers, same journals, fields and years — Drawn by script from the same tables of contents; coded by a third person who was not told what the study was about (June 2026) - Four hundred authors of unpublished replication attempts, Named in conference abstracts, 2016–2024, with no subsequent paper — Written to twice, in February and again in May, offering unlimited length, no fee, and permanent hosting of the data (February–June 2026) - Prof. Xiomara Betancur-Hale, Editor, one of the twelve journals; has handled 61 registered reports — Read the full draft, then interviewed by video call for ninety minutes (July 2026) - Dr. Aurelio Nkemdi-Pryce, Meta-researcher; built the field-matching procedure we used — Interviewed by video call twice; supplied his code, which we ran ourselves (May and July 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-2161: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-2161 - PX-2185: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-2185 ## What we could not confirm - Whether the format causes the gap or merely attracts a different kind of question. We matched on journal, field and year. We could not match on question, because nobody has a taxonomy of questions, and a replication of a famous claim is a different animal from a first look at a new one. - What is in the sixty-two drawers. We have sixty-two reasons and nine files. A reason is not a result, and it is possible that some of the sixty-two studies were abandoned because they were badly run rather than because they came out flat. - Whether the eleven authors who told us the drive was lost had looked for it. We asked. Four said they had searched; two said they had not; five did not answer the follow-up. ## Right of reply **Prof. Xiomara Betancur-Hale, journal editor** (Replied 19 July 2026. Printed in full and unedited, including the paragraph about us.): > I want to begin by saying that the compilation is good work and that I have checked forty of your 296 against my own records and found one error, which you have already corrected. So this is not a complaint about your arithmetic. > > It is a complaint about the sentence your arithmetic will be used to write. > > Your figure puts 95 next to 39 and invites the reader to subtract. But the two sets of papers are not answering the same kind of question, and I know this because I commission both. A conventional submission arrives after the work is done. By definition it has survived the author's own decision about whether it was worth writing up, and authors mostly make that decision by looking at the result. A registered report arrives before the work is done, and the people who choose that route are disproportionately the ones who suspect the answer is going to be dull — replicators, adversarial collaborators, and the sort of careful person who wants the protection of a prior commitment precisely because they expect to find nothing. I am not selecting studies. I am selecting temperaments. > > So the honest reading of your chart is not that eight thousand conventional papers are false. It is that the two formats catch the literature at different moments and the gap between them is an upper bound on how much the moment matters. Your own third paragraph nearly says this. Your headline does not, and your headline will travel further than your third paragraph. It always does. > > On the four hundred letters, I think you have accidentally proved my point and I would like you to sit with it. You offered these people unlimited space, no fee, permanent hosting and a newspaper's audience, which is a better deal than any journal on earth offers, and four hundred letters produced nine files. That is not a system holding something back. That is a system in which writing the thing up costs the author nine months and buys them nothing, and your offer, generous as it is, did not change the nine months. Neither does mine. Registered reports work because the commitment happens before the author has anything better to do with the time. > > One last thing, and I say it without malice. You describe yourselves as testing a claim about the file drawer. You are also, in this instance, a publisher soliciting manuscripts and then reporting on how few you got. I do not think that makes the finding wrong. I think it makes you a party, and I would have liked to see that admitted higher up the page than it is. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.