What kind of research failures are publishable?
A lot depends on the message which is conveyed by the paper and how it is formulated. In your example, essentially, researchers take system A, use theory A' to explain the experimental results observed in it, publish 1st paper, then take system B, use the same theory and find that the theory does not work in the sense that it cannot describe the experiment there. So, a paper saying &quot;system B shows interesting behaviour which is not captured by theory A', see how&quot; has higher chances being published than a paper saying &quot;we tried to apply theory A' to system B and it does not work&quot;.
Further, it is very common that if you achieved a &quot;failure&quot; (which is not the best word if applied to research), that is, a negative result, you can reformulate your message to make it sound &quot;positive&quot;. In particular, you can analyse why exactly your attempts did not work, what was lacking in your theory (theories usually have assumptions and/or model simplifications) and how further theories can be improved to actually do the job. This is valuable information and often is perfectly publishable.