Context: You are a young scientist, under constant evaluation that may not only fire you, but also invalidate lots of your previous work. You have to produce flashy results to grow up on your career. You _really_ do not desire to get stuck where you are now.
Now, let's decide on a new experiment to proceed. Do you choose:
a - Boring important experiment that you can't hype but will surely advance your field;
b - Flashy, risky experiment that probably won't lead anywhere, but will change your life if you got lucky;
Now, let's say you go with "b" (that's a non-brainier). Four years into the experiment your results aren't going anywhere. Do you:
a - Accept it's a failed experiment, accept the failure that will set your career back 4 years, start again;
b - Insist on getting more data. Insist on getting more data. Insist on ... oh, never mind, that last data is impressive¹, publish it and go ahead.
This quandary is a great argument for never becoming an academic researcher.
It would seem to me that science needs to eliminate "career bias" or "mortgage bias" or "ramen bias" from its results. Negative results need to be just as publishable as significant results.
If I were tyrant of the Ivory Tower, I would decree that results be blinded until after acceptance for publication. I would further decree that prestige be allocated such that the first and second replications have equal prestige to an original publication, and successive replications are worth less prestige, but are still worth attempting.
The only failed experiment is one that does not advance the body of human knowledge. Negative results still let us know that one thing was tried, and it didn't work--it crosses off one line in a process of elimination. And those that fudge data and methods to produce the appearance of a result, and those that are so flawed as to be non-reproducible, are failures in that sense, even if they still allow for the career advancement of a few people.
I don't know exactly how they work, because I'm not a tenured full professor on a committee, deciding which candidate for hiring (or tenure, promotion, or whatever else) has the best CV.
I would guess that original research showing significant results, published in a major journal, with a lot of citations by peers, earns the most points. You have to ascend higher on the prestige point leaderboard to get the career advancement achievements and character perks.
Context: You are a young scientist, under constant evaluation that may not only fire you, but also invalidate lots of your previous work. You have to produce flashy results to grow up on your career. You _really_ do not desire to get stuck where you are now.
Now, let's decide on a new experiment to proceed. Do you choose:
a - Boring important experiment that you can't hype but will surely advance your field;
b - Flashy, risky experiment that probably won't lead anywhere, but will change your life if you got lucky;
Now, let's say you go with "b" (that's a non-brainier). Four years into the experiment your results aren't going anywhere. Do you:
a - Accept it's a failed experiment, accept the failure that will set your career back 4 years, start again;
b - Insist on getting more data. Insist on getting more data. Insist on ... oh, never mind, that last data is impressive¹, publish it and go ahead.
1 - https://www.xkcd.com/882/