e-ISSN: Pending

Browse the failure-mode index

49 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures in Decision Sciences · Negative / Null Result Report. Search the index →

WASTE indexes published research — it does not host or republish full papers. Each entry is a metadata record compiled from open scholarly databases; the abstract is shown in full only where the paper is openly licensed, otherwise a short excerpt under fair use. Classifications are automated and approximate.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDecision Sciences

Towards end-to-end automation of AI research

Chris Lu, Cong Lu, R. T. Lange et al. · 2026 · Nature

Abstract The automation of science is a long-standing ambition in artificial intelligence (AI) research 1,2 . Although the community has made substantial progress in automating individual components of the scientific process, a system that autonomously navigates the entire research life cycle—from conception to publication—has remained out of reach. Here we present a pipeline for automating the entire scientific process end to end. We present The AI Scientist, which creates research ideas, writes code, runs experiments, plots and analyses data, writes the entire scientific manuscript, and perf

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportDecision Sciences

The fragility of statistically significant findings from randomised controlled trials in the urological literature

Vikram M. Narayan, Shreyas Gandhi, Kristin Chrouser et al. · 2018 · British Journal of Urology

OBJECTIVES: To use the Fragility Index to evaluate the robustness of statistically significant findings from urological randomised controlled trials (RCTs). MATERIALS AND METHODS: The 'Fragility Index' is defined as the minimum number of…

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDecision Sciences

Wisdom of crowds and collective decision-making in a survival situation with complex information integration

Daisuke Hamada, Masataka Nakayama, Jun Saiki · 2020 · Cognitive Research Principles and Implications

BACKGROUND: The wisdom of crowds and collective decision-making are important tools for integrating information between individuals, which can exceed the capacity of individual judgments. They are based on different forms of information integration. The wisdom of crowds refers to the aggregation of many independent judgments without deliberation and consensus, while collective decision-making is aggregation with deliberation and consensus. Recent research has shown that collective decision-making outperforms the wisdom of crowds. Additionally, many studies have shown that metacognitive knowled

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDecision Sciences

The intriguing evolution of effect sizes in biomedical research over time: smaller but more often statistically significant

Paul Monsarrat, Jean‐Noël Vergnes · 2017 · GigaScience

Background: In medicine, effect sizes (ESs) allow the effects of independent variables (including risk/protective factors or treatment interventions) on dependent variables (e.g., health outcomes) to be quantified. Given that many public health decisions and health care policies are based on ES estimates, it is important to assess how ESs are used in the biomedical literature and to investigate potential trends in their reporting over time. Results: Through a big data approach, the text mining process automatically extracted 814 120 ESs from 13 322 754 PubMed abstracts. Eligible ESs were risk

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDecision Sciences

Predicting Stock Prices Using Machine Learning Methods and Deep Learning Algorithms: The Sample of the Istanbul Stock Exchange

Uğur Demirel, Handan Çam, Ramazan Ünlü · 2020 · GAZI UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF SCIENCE

Stock market prediction in financial and commodity markets is a major challenge for speculators, investors, and companies but also profitable with an accurate prediction. Thus, obtaining accurate prediction results becomes extremely…

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDecision Sciences

The Null Result Penalty

Felix Chopra, Ingar Haaland, Christopher Roth et al. · 2023 · The Economic Journal

Abstract We examine how the evaluation of research studies in economics depends on whether a study yielded a null result. Studies with null results are perceived to be less publishable, of lower quality, less important and less precisely…

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDecision Sciences

The influence of mortality and socioeconomic status on risk and delayed rewards: a replication with British participants

Gillian Pepper, Deirdre Corby, Rachel Bamber et al. · 2017 · PeerJ

Here, we report three attempts to replicate a finding from an influential psychological study (Griskevicius et al., 2011b). The original study found interactions between childhood SES and experimental mortality-priming condition in predicting risk acceptance and delay discounting outcomes. The original study used US student samples. We used British university students (replication 1) and British online samples (replications 2 and 3) with a modified version of the original priming material, which was tailored to make it more credible to a British audience. We did not replicate the interaction b

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDecision Sciences

Meta-analyzing the multiverse: A peek under the hood of selective reporting.

Anton Olsson-Collentine, Robbie C. M. van Aert, Marjan Bakker et al. · 2023 · Psychological Methods

-hacking) from this "multiverse" of outcomes can inflate effect size estimates and false positive rates. We studied the effects of researcher degrees of freedom and selective reporting using empirical data from extensive multistudy…

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDecision Sciences

A randomized trial of an editorial intervention to reduce spin in the abstract’s conclusion of manuscripts showed no significant effect

Mona Ghannad, Bada Yang, Mariska Leeflang et al. · 2020 · Journal of Clinical Epidemiology

OBJECTIVE: To estimate the effect of an intervention compared to the usual peer-review process on reducing spin in the abstract's conclusion of biomedical study reports. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: We conducted a two-arm, parallel-group RCT in a sample of primary research manuscripts submitted to BMJ Open. The authors received short instructions alongside the peer reviewers' comments in the intervention group. We assessed the presence of spin (primary outcome), types of spin, and wording change in the revised abstract's conclusion. Outcome assessors were blinded to the intervention assignment. R

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDecision Sciences

Magical thinking in predictions of negative events: Evidence for tempting fate but not for a protection effect

J. van Wolferen, Yoel Inbar, Marcel Zeelenberg · 2013 · Judgment and Decision Making

Abstract In this paper we test two hypotheses regarding magical thinking about the perceived likelihood of future events. The first is that people believe that those who “tempt fate” by failing to take necessary precautions are more likely to suffer negative outcomes. The second is the “protection effect”, where reminding people of precautions they have taken leads them to see related risks as less likely. To this end, we describe the results from three attempted direct replications of a protection effect experiment reported in Tykocinski (2008) and two replications of a tempting fate experime

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDecision Sciences

The suspension of morality in organisations: Conceptualising organisational moral disengagement and testing its role in relation to unethical behaviours and silence

Roberta Fida, Irene Skovgaard‐Smith, Claudio Barbaranelli et al. · 2024 · Human Relations

While considerable attention has been devoted to understanding how individual characteristics influence unethical actions, far less research has examined the role of social and organisational processes. We introduce the concept of organisational moral disengagement (OrgMD), drawing on Bandura’s moral agency theory, to explain how unethicality may be fostered in organisations. OrgMD is a multilevel construct, capturing perceptions of the mechanisms through which morality can be suspended in an organisation allowing unethical practices to flourish. Using four empirical studies, we validated OrgM

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDecision Sciences

Artificial intelligence, data elements, digital economy, and corporate innovation performance

Yuan Ma, Wenchao Zhang, Chengxiang Ma et al. · 2025 · International Review of Economics & Finance

In an era defined by digital transformation, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a critical driver of corporate competitiveness, yet the mechanisms through which it enhances innovation remain a key area of inquiry. This study…

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDecision Sciences

Influence of Strategic Planning to Firm Performance in Agricultural Research Based Institutions of Kenya

Yusuf Wanjala Musi, Elegwa Mukulu, Margaret Oloko · 2018 · Journal of Management and Sustainability

Strategic planning is a very crucial phenomenon in all organisations. It is the tool that determines the destiny of the firm. The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of financial resource strategic planning on firm performance, to determine influence of human capital strategic planning on firm performance, to analyze the influence of material resource strategic planning on firm performance and to determine influence of information resource strategic planning on firm performance in agriculture research based institutions of Kenya. Although there had been previous internatio

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDecision Sciences

No relationship between researcher impact and replication effect: an analysis of five studies with 100 replications

John Protzko, Jonathan W. Schooler · 2020 · PeerJ

What explanation is there when teams of researchers are unable to successfully replicate already established ‘canonical’ findings? One suggestion that has been put forward, but left largely untested, is that those researchers who fail to replicate prior studies are of low ‘expertise and diligence’ and lack the skill necessary to successfully replicate the conditions of the original experiment. Here we examine the replication success of 100 scientists of differing ‘expertise and diligence’ who attempted to replicate five different studies. Using a bibliometric tool ( h -index) as our indicator

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportDecision Sciences

Statistically Significant! But Is Trust of Practical Significance?

Dapeng Liu, Heinz Roland Weistroffer · 2020 · Journal of Computer Information Systems

Trust, such as trust in a technology or believing that a technology has trustworthy utility, manifests its importance by affecting user behaviors toward information systems (IS). There is no dearth of evidence showing that the effect of…

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDecision Sciences

Enhancing the Ethical Culture of Organizations: A Longitudinal Study Using a Comprehensive Ethics Training

Pablo Ruiz‐Palomino, Juliana Toro‐Arias, María del Pilar Rodríguez‐Córdoba et al. · 2025 · Business Ethics the Environment & Responsibility

ABSTRACT A supportive ethical culture (EC) can encourage moral behavior among employees and help them avoid wrongdoing. One option for fostering EC is ethics training; its longer‐term effectiveness, however, has rarely been examined,…

View details →