Everyone bangs on about "publish or perish", but here's a look at the opposite case : astronomy surveys which never produce a publication. Specifically, surveys using European Southern Observatory facilities, about half of which don't produce a publication in the timeframe specified. However, about 36% of those (so about 18% overall) were still working on the data at the time the survey was conducted, and this turns out to be compatible with the average time between collecting data and producing a publication. And 10% had simply been misidentified, and had published a paper after all. Hence through lack of time I won't attempt to correct for this in the rest of this little summary.
There's sometimes talk of null/negative results not getting enough publication. This turns out to be a significant factor in the remaining cases, but not at all the dominant one. There isn't really a single dominant factor, it's a combination of things. That said, some reasons are essentially negligible : the authors just lost interest, they published a non-refereed paper instead, they had inadequate tools to process the data.
More significant are that the observers just didn't get as much or as good quality data that they required, they lacked the resources (e.g. manpower) to complete the analysis to get a meaningful result, or a variety of other reasons. That "other reasons" category sounds quite interesting :
...the most frequent being that the person leading the project left the field. Other recurrent explanations included: lack of ancillary data from other facilities, results not meeting expectations, lowered priority of the project because of more pressing activities, quicker results obtained by other teams and/or with better suited instruments, nondetections, etc.
Which sounds to me like the "results aren't interesting enough" slice of the pie could probably be increased a bit. We keep hearing about the importance of replication, but there's a motivational pressure against doing things people have done before - even if they might not have done it very well.
http://doi.eso.org/10.18727/0722-6691/5055
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