Most of the great scientists worked on a single idea their entire life and expanded upon it, improved it, corrected it and were never really done with it (einstein comes to mind). Scientific knowledge is never final

I personally have a huge beef with the way life scientists publish their results in tiny tiny bits, that makes it extremely hard to cross-check them with other studies, to find out if they were later disproved or even to figure out the average of some quantity. Try making a concrete model of something and you will find yourself searching for experimentally measured values in tomes among the blabber of introductions and discussions, like monks did in the middle ages... Databases sometimes exist, but they are not mandatory so you never know if they are to be trusted. We need a structured way to catalog scientific results , and journals are not it (esp. with politics which lead scientists to publish in marginally related journals ).