A new online resource has been launched which offers us the chance to find out what isn't happening in science.
BioNOT is a free searchable database of negative findings in biology and medicine.
Text mining approaches to the scientific literature have become increasingly popular as a way of helping researchers to make sense of a growing number of papers. But they've tended to focus on positive findings and skim over negative ones. In this sense they're following in the tradition of scientists themselves, unfortunately.
It's also hard to search for negative findings on PubMed, because if you type in, say, vaccines NOT associated with autism in the hopes of finding papers showing that vaccines don't cause autism, it will think you are trying to search for "vaccines" and don't want to see any papers mentioning the words "associated with autism". So you end up with 160,000 hits about vaccines with ...
