Whilst browsing Wikipedia, I came across a poignant early example of publication bias, the failure to make public scientific results that don't support a given hypothesis.
The Judenzählung was a census of the German military carried out in 1916, at the height of the First World War. It was designed to measure the number of Jewish soldiers in the army.
The background to this was the feeling, very powerful in Germany at that time, that the Jewish German minority were "unpatriotic" or "traitorous", and were dodging military service or avoiding front line combat.
The survey was completed, but the results were not published, apparently because they revealed that, contrary to popular belief, Jews were at least as likely as non-Jews to be serving in the army, and were overrepresented on the front lines as well. (Some of the data did emerge after the war, however, when they were criticized for ...
