A finding of absence and an absence of findings

"Science is marred by a pernicious survivorship bias, affecting the way research gets published. In a way that is similar to journalism, research that yields no result does not make it to print. That may seem sensible, as newspapers do not have to have a screaming headline saying that nothing new is taking place (though the Bible was smart enough to declare ein cbadash tacht hashemesb - "nothing new under the sun", providing the information that things just do recur). The problem is that a finding of absence and an absence of findings get mixed together. There may be great information in the fact that nothing took place. As Sherlock Holmes noted in the Silver Blaze case - the curious thing was that the dog did not bark. More problematically, there are plenty of scientific results that are left out of publications because they are not statistically significant, but nevertheless provide information."