What kind of research failures are publishable? Suppose that a physicist has discovered that the presence of X causes Y in a certain kind of systems. So they go a step ahead and try to work on a similar idea of X being the cause of Y in a little different kind of systems and it takes them months to arrive at the results.
But lo! That relation does not hold true here.
Is this result publishable? In general, what kind of failures in research are not failures from the point of view of writing papers about them? For example, if someone starts off hoping to prove the Riemann Hypothesis and discovers that it is not true, that is 100% publishable since a lot is riding on the RH.
Is a lot riding on it the only thing at work in such situations?
A lot depends on the message which is conveyed by the paper and how it is formulated. In your example, essentially, researchers take system A, use theory A' to explain the experimental results observed in it, publish 1st paper, then take system B, use the same theory and find that the theory does not work in the sense that it cannot describe the experiment there. So, a paper saying &quot;system B shows interesting behaviour which is not captured by theory A', see how&quot; has higher chances being published than a paper saying &quot;we tried to apply theory A' to system B and it does not work&quot;.
Further, it is very common that if you achieved a &quot;failure&quot; (which is not the best word if applied to research), that is, a negative result, you can reformulate your message to make it sound &quot;positive&quot;. In particular, you can analyse why exactly your attempts did not work, what was lacking in your theory (theories usually have assumptions and/or model simplifications) and how further theories can be improved to actually do the job. This is valuable information and often is perfectly publishable.