> So why do they publish if they're not 100% confident ? Why not wait to be certain ?
There are very good reasons to publish before one is "100% certain". It can get lots of other scientists to evaluate your information where they can try to reproduce it or poke holes in your theories. It just makes sense to do that with a tone of "We got some interesting results..." as opposed to what happened in the summer which was more like "We've made one of the biggest discoveries of mankind!!!"
Yeah, there’s a very good argument I’ve read from researchers that instead of papers we should be publishing continuously what our results are to encourage this early and often community interaction/feedback (ie more like code reviews). The reason it doesn’t happen is publish/perish + needing to be first to publish (ie someone taking your work and beating you to the punch and getting all the credit).
Getting other people to inspect your work sounds great for you but it costs those people a time and money.
So, the incentives for misuse are really high and the net result is that shortcutting the process is a net drag on progress. People remember the bigs stuff like FTL neutrinos, cold fusion, NK-99, etc but arguably this also shows up as part of the ‘reproducibility crisis’ in many fields.
There are very good reasons to publish before one is "100% certain". It can get lots of other scientists to evaluate your information where they can try to reproduce it or poke holes in your theories. It just makes sense to do that with a tone of "We got some interesting results..." as opposed to what happened in the summer which was more like "We've made one of the biggest discoveries of mankind!!!"