system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How common is it for people not to publish academic research because it didn't come to the wanted conclusion?

 How common is it for people not to publish academic research because it didn't come to the wanted conclusion?
gpt
Look up "positive publication bias". There is a strong incentive to publish only positive and novel results, which is distorts the true reality of research: many experiments "fail" and many experiments are confirmatory. 

This is a problem as then almost any positive result is spun to be hugely important despite a flawed experimental design which makes it highly likely to be spurious.