"The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.
"He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
"Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using-- not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.
"I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science."
- Richard Feynman
http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html
Maybe it's one of those papers that, by a less charitable interpretation than Feynman, invalidates an entire field of study and undercuts it's central assumptions, so it just gets ignored.
For fun, I also found this 1938 paper as I was looking around that I haven't read. It's interesting what random things scientists were doing during this time and what debates were had [3].
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[0] "The effect of incidental stimuli on maze learning with the white rat" https://doi.org/10.1037/h0071189
[1] "Further studies of the effect of incidental stimuli on maze learning with the white rat" https://doi.org/10.1037/h0075810
[2] "Correlations between conditioning and maze learning in the white rat" https://doi.org/10.1037/h0053662
[3] "The effect of a native Mexican diet on learning and reasoning in white rats" https://doi.org/10.1037/h0061906 (The study found that the rats had less body mass, but did not find a statistically significant difference in maze solving ability.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel
Mendel’s work was not appreciated for 30 years. Ignoring ignored works is following the herd.
Google Scholar says this study has been cited by a measly 16 papers since it was published in 1973:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1453678737796934715...
Without any other context, I would assume that the relative lack of studies that reference this paper suggests that there might be issues with reputability.
But who knows? Maybe it's a gem that never got the attention it deserved.