This happened to me so often in a graduate student except that I thought my abilities as a bench chemist were poor and that’s why I couldn’t repeat many experiments from journals. I quit with a masters and I remember one incident after I decided to quit where my advisor and I were at odds because I could not get a yield that a paper described. He asked the star veteran PhD student to step in and help and he was never able to get anywhere near the published yield either.

I still don’t think I was a great bench chemist but I think about this a lot - especially because at the time many folks in my chemistry building dismissed failed reactions published in journals. They just shrugged them off and tried something else instead of reaching out and asking the publisher - “hey, I can’t get this to work, what am i doing wrong?”

I regret not questioning more.