> Even in the "hard" sciences even if the experimental data itself is solid there can be confounders that were overlooked and will only be uncovered by follow-up studies, depending on importance of the result it might take years.
I work in fluid dynamics. In one subfield I work in there is at least one confounder in most studies (Weber number and Reynolds number are confounded, in particular) and an important variable is often omitted (turbulence intensity). Many people don't seem aware that turbulence intensity matters, either, and most who do think it matters don't want to measure or estimate it, so it tends to be ignored. Just because it's hard to measure does not mean it's not important! This is supposed to be "hard" science, but sometimes I feel it's not much better than social science.
How long has this been a problem? I'd say over 50 years, easily!
At a recent conference, one of my papers addressed these issues briefly (I tried to avoid them in a data analysis), but I think it'll take more than that to correct these problems. So I'm planning a new article specifically addressing these concerns. I still expect progress to be slow, but any movement in the right direction would be appreciated...