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to tell whether a piece of research is false or not, you need to be able to find out what it was. then you can conclusively prove it false. lost research like tesla's weather control notes, the alchemists' transmutation of lead into gold, or water-powered cars can instead give rise to conspiracy theories about how it was suppressed by the powerful and wasted lifetimes that could have been dedicated to something productive

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It also forces the next generation of scientists to repeat the same mistakes instead of learning from the past.

Of course it would be easier still to learn from mistakes if academic research allowed for more honesty about negative or undecipherable results, but that's another issue.

It's still orders of magnitude easier to do some in-depth analysis on a paper in your chosen field to see if it looks like a load of BS than to get funding and conduct a study yourself to see if a hypothesis pans out with some kind of meaningful result.

i don't think you can reject a hypothesis because someone conducted a shitty study; results from shitty studies are sort of by definition inconclusive. usually there are things you can learn from their shitty study tho

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