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I think your's and the parent comment are both right, just addressing different extremes.

Sometimes you find evidence that doesn't quite match up with previous work, but if an explanatory framework isn't forthcoming, it can be difficult to say who's results are right, and what they mean. On the other hand, sometimes you come across something blatantly wrong, so you do your follow up experiments to confirm and you're all set. It's only the latter case that will quickly make it into a manuscript.

I will say, I've seen some big corrections (like this-allele-was-actually-a-completely-different-mutant bad) that just get buried in the results section of a subsequent publication, and no retraction was ever submitted for the original paper. That was definitely a failure in the field, and likely the result of the status of the authors involved.




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