Your faith in the reliability of the scientific process is touching, but naive. Bad research is driving public policy in many areas.
> Even good research doesn't always hold up over time.
In the sense that it gets superseded by better models (as Bohr's original model of the atom did), sure. That's to be expected in a healthy scientific field. But one of the things that's needed to keep a field healthy in that respect is the ability to do controlled experiments with high accuracy. That's how scientists figured out that Bohr's original model of the atom wasn't right--it couldn't match the results of the experiments as they got more accurate.