  An academic scientist's professional success depends on publishing.
Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary
incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit
positive results and ignore negative results. Prior reports demonstrate how
these incentives inflate the rate of false effects in published science. When
incentives favor novelty over replication, false results persist in the
literature unchallenged, reducing efficiency in knowledge accumulation.
Previous suggestions to address this problem are unlikely to be effective. For
example, a journal of negative results publishes otherwise unpublishable
reports. This enshrines the low status of the journal and its content. The
persistence of false findings can be meliorated with strategies that make the
fundamental but abstract accuracy motive - getting it right - competitive with
the more tangible and concrete incentive - getting it published. We develop
strategies for improving scientific practices and knowledge accumulation that
account for ordinary human motivations and self-serving biases.
