The number of papers which are refuted, in the sense that a serious error is identified that invalidates the main conclusions of the paper, are a vanishingly sm

The number of papers which are refuted, in the sense that a serious error is identified that invalidates the main conclusions of the paper, are a vanishingly small percentage of papers published. This doesn't mean that a vanishingly small percentage of papers are wrong, only that it is very hard to identify errors because papers usually don't contain enough information to fully reconstruct the results. There are a lot of assumptions of good will in the system.