When I was in academia, it was not unusual for the referees to reject a paper for this reason. Of course, you are informed of that and always have the option to rewrite the paper to include that information.

In some cases, though, it's not simply a matter of listing it as other work in the Intro - you may need to incorporate it into your models, etc.

That's no justification for the rationale that critique or negative results in general are not paper worth or do not advance science in less short-sighted ways.

I wasn't discussing the appropriateness - I was pointing out that this behavior is normal in science. Your original comment was:

> Since when is a scientific paper required to do that.

Unfortunately, for a long time (since well before my time, at least).

beyond reviewers or editors asking you to make changes like this (for example, "so-and-so just published <blah> which means that your sentence about <blah> is obsolete"), we're talking about research coming from a corporation. If one part of the company is trashing another part of the company, and it's based on stale results, asking to have the paper updated to include the latest results is reasonable.

If you are actually an academic researchers in an academia institution, and are exposed to a large scope of the dealings of the community, then you might find that professional academia is as political as corporations, if not more so...