If people are so interested, they'd presumably read and cite null-result publications, and their authors would get the same boons as if having published a positive result.

There's some issues, though. Firstly, how do you enforce citing negative results? In the case of positive results, reviewers can ask that work be cited if it had already introduced things present in the article. This is because a publication is a claim to originality.

But how do you define originality in not following a given approach? Anyone can not have the idea of doing something. You can't well cite all the paths not followed in your work, considering you might not even be aware of a negative result publication regarding these ideas you discarded or didn't have. Bibliography is time consuming enough as it is, without having to also cite all things irrelevant.

Another issue is that the effort to write an article and get it published and, on the other side, to review it, makes it hard to justify publishing negative results. I'd say an issue is rather that many positive results are already not getting published... There's a lot of informal knowledge, as people don't have time to write 100 page papers with all the tricks and details regularly, nor reviewers to read them.

Also, I could see a larger acceptance of negative result publications bringing perverse incentives. Currently, you have to get somewhere eventually. If negative results become legitimate publications, what would e.g. PhD theses become? Oh, we tried to reinvent everything but nothing worked, here's 200 pages of negative results no-one would have reasonably tried anyways. While the current state of affairs favours incremental research, I think that is still better than no serious research at all.

> If people are so interested, they'd presumably read and cite null-result publications,

The thing is, people mostly cite work they're building upon, and it's often difficult to build much on a null result.

If I'm an old-timey scientist trying to invent the first lightbulb, and I try a brass filament and it doesn't work, then I try a steel filament and it doesn't work, then I try an aluminium filament and it doesn't work - will anyone be interested in that?

On the other hand, if I tested platinum or carbonised paper or something else that actually works? Well, there's a lot more to build on there, and a lot more to be interested in.