[rossdavidh]

Agreed. However, another factor may be that, we tend to scrutinize more closely results that don't line up with what we expected. In fact, in this case it was another researcher who had gotten results that pointed in the opposite direction, who convinced the original researcher to release their data (which, to their credit, they did).

Which, is one reason why having higher and higher percentages of academia and science researchers be from the same part of the political spectrum, is worrisome to me. If you have more diversity in ideology, there is more likely to be someone in each field to have the instinct to scrutinize closely a result which, when scrutinized, won't hold up.