Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Web site offers scientists access to lessons from failed experiments

The New York Times Bits blog profiled the website ResearchGate, which gathers lessons from failed scientific experiments and makes them available to other researchers:

“Science is very inefficient,” says Ijad Madisch, founder of a Web site called ResearchGate. “You try an experiment, fail, try again, fail, try again, it works. And what works is what you publish. All the data about failure is wasted.”

Begun in 2008, ResearchGate claims to have 11,000 research and educational institutions among its users. It aims to be a place where people can share what they learned in the failed experiments. Some of this is documented, but a great deal more takes place across chat rooms where scientists informally exchange information.

The ResearchGate site also includes a user post asking for a database of data from failed experiments, a proposal I've seen before (but can't recall where). It's a great idea:

I think developing a database for the storage of failed experiments makes sense for experiments that lost the chance to be shown in published articles. Everyone could upload their experimental results which they find unsatisfactory, including the experiment method, experiment data, and the experiment purpose.

This experimental data can give a good experience and lessons to the researchers who want to perform similar experiments. They can improve their experiment based on the failing example. Someone might also give a different opinion for the unreasonable experimental data, and then test their idea. Maybe a novel theory can be developed from these failed experiments. Or, like the Post It, the unsuccessful experiment data could be used to solve other problems.



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