>That's usually because if someone publishes an interesting result, other people do follow up studies with better controls.
No, no, a thousand times no!
Most studies do not have follow up studies that confirm/refute the original. Often such a followup study is hard to publish. If you manage to reproduce it, you cannot publish unless it presents a new finding. If you fail to reproduce it, it often doesn't get published either. And no one writes grant applications that are for replication studies. The grant will likely go to someone else.
When I was in grad school, few advisors (engineering/physics) would have allowed their students to perform a replication study.
>But either way, people find out.
I wish I could find the meta-study, but someone once published a study of retracted papers in medicine. They found that a number of them were still being cited - despite the retraction (and they were being cited as support for their own papers...). So no, people don't find out.
>But if you're actually a working scientist, you should understand that already and not take everything you see in a journal as actual truth, but as something maybe might be true.
I agree. But then you end up writing a paper that cites another paper in support of your work. Or a paper that builds up on another paper. This isn't the exception - this is the norm. Very few people will actually worry about whether the paper they are citing is true.
When I was doing my PhD, people in my specialized discipline were all working on coming up with a theoretical model of an effect seen by an experimentalist. I was once at a conference and asked some of the PIs who were doing similar work to mine: Do you believe the experimentalist's paper? Everyone said "No". Yet all of us published papers citing the experimentalists' paper as background for our work (he was a giant in the field).
Another problem not touched upon here: Many papers (at least in my discipline) simply do not provide enough details to reproduce! They'll make broad statements (e.g. made measurement X), but no details on how they made those measurements. Once you're dealing at the quantum scale, you generally cannot buy off the shelf meters. Experimentalists have the skill of building their own measuring instruments. But those details are rarely mentioned in the paper. If I tried reproducing the study and failed, I would not know if the problem is in the paper or in some detail of how I designed my equipment.
When I wrote my paper, the journal had a 3 page limit. As such, I had to omit details of my calculations. I just wrote the process (e.g. used well-known-method X) and then the final result. However, I had spent most of my time actually doing method X - it was highly nontrivial and required several mathematical tricks. I would not expect any random peer to figure it all out. But hey, I unambiguously wrote how I did it, so I've satisfied the requirements.
When I highlighted this to people in the field, they were quite open with another explanation: It helps them because they do not want their peers to know all the details. That allows them to have an edge over their peers and they do not need to race with them to publish further studies.
I can assure you: None of these people I dealt with were interested in furthering science. They were interested in furthering their careers, and getting away with as little science as is needed to achieve that objective.