Maggie's Farm

"As we have reported here at Maggie's for many years, they [most scientific results] probably are mostly bunk."

In light of Albert Einstein's brilliant insights into relativity, Isaac Newton's contributions to science are apparently mostly "bunk" by your definition but hardly a reason for Isaac not to have announced them and, instead, to have waited until Albert could come along to set the old guy straight.

There's a vast difference between something being wrong and being incomplete, between being wrong and of no useful value, between being fraudulently wrong and being unintentionally so. And there's a reason why negative research results are reported less often than positive ones. It costs authors and researchers and their sources of funding a great deal of money to publish papers in journals. The not unsubstantial cost of publishing a negative result in most cases outweighs any direct benefit to the author if not to the whole field. Not only that, in many fields of research the current literature is already at or near the point of being too huge for researchers to follow. Add reports of negative results, which would undoubtedly outnumber those of positive ones, and the journals would be too huge and costly for people to read or subscribe to. Plus, the added burden on the (unpaid) reviewers for peer-reviewed journals to critique huge numbers of such manuscripts would be unsustainable.