The focus shouldn't be on positive results, the focus should be on publishing results. A correctly incentivized researcher would strive to publish, and strive to improve knowledge in their field.
What prevents scientists from publishing several failures and arbitrarily jumping ship off any experiments because it's faster to fail than it is to succeed?
The reason to publish failure, currently, is to challenge accepted knowledge. This can be very good for one's career. This is also done, to a lesser degree, for assumed knowledge.
But I think you'd be able to control for random failure publishing if some rigor (i.e. why did you do this) was involved.
I really don't know how incentives would be changed to allow for this though.
Currently the market (i.e. citations and novelty) are the incentives. They are gamed though, but I think ongoing discussion about problems does mitigate that over time. As everything in academia, it does take long.
If you never get a positive result then you're probably just not good at science. Also I can't imagine any scientists who gets up and tries to fail everyday.
However, they're still advancing knowledge. Just because your experiment doesn't work doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile.
If you publish your failure then future researchers don't have to waste their time walking down the same path.
> If you never get a positive result then you're probably just not good at science. Also I can't imagine any scientists who gets up and tries to fail everyday.
Science is this: Try to disprove (i.e. fail) your hypothesis. If you've failed sufficiently, then you have something that can be published.
> Just because your experiment doesn't work doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile.
If experiments don't work then you need to redo them to figure out why they didn't work. An experiment with a negative result is not an experiment that didn't work. It worked, but gave you an answer you did not expect. Verify.
Every scientist I know (a lot) and have interacted with understand that a negative result is not a worthwhile result.
> If you publish your failure then future researchers don't have to waste their time walking down the same path.
Scientists often publish negative results. This is mostly done if it disproves some other published work that you do not believe, through some experience of your own, and want to test with a different test or a more rigorous test. But if it does not challenge something that's accepted, it's unlikely to get acknowledged and is therefore of low value to the lab and to the scientist that is publishing. They cannot afford to put that above their own career success.
And if they did they would find it harder and harder to get grant money and therefore will fail in the academic field completely. You cannot (except for extreme edge cases) contribute to science without money.
Or they're hard working and cannot afford to waste time that won't lead them to success, i.e. more grant money.