Why don't I see publications criticising other publications? This is about technology research specifically.

Often when reading a publication I'll be thinking to myself: "Yeah, you've got that thing, but what about this and that limitation you brush off and this and that assumption which seems pretty poorly justified?" After starting my PhD I got pretty shocked just how common that seems to be.

The only critiques of other publications I ever see are either in literature review sections of papers suggesting alternative methods, or mentioned in surveys. In either case those tend to be not very in-depth.

Why is this the case? It seems to me like something that would be pretty damaging to research in general, as then you see a lot of papers with built-in assumptions and limitations propagated by their predecessors.
Such criticisms are common in journals like Nature and PNAS. They're often not called "papers" -- PNAS calls them "Letters", Science calls them "Technical Comments", and Nature calls them "Brief Communications Arising" -- but they do get a significant degree of pre-publication scrutiny and often are peer reviewed. Some examples from the past few weeks:


Is “choline and geranate” an ionic liquid or deep eutectic solvent system? (PNAS)
Tagging the musical beat: Neural entrainment or event-related potentials? (PNAS)
Comment on “Predicting reaction performance in C–N cross-coupling using machine learning” (Science)
Comment on “The earliest modern humans outside Africa” (Science)
Assumptions for emergent constraints (Nature)
Emergent constraints on climate sensitivity (Nature)
Climate constraint reflects forced signal (Nature)


Other journals also have systems for responses, though most are not as organized about it.

So the premise is not quite right -- criticisms of high-profile papers are not unusual -- but it's true that the vast majority of papers don't get formal critiques like this -- even though the vast majority of papers probably do have something that could be criticized.

That's part of the reason. Very few papers are completely above reproach (except for my own, of course). If I was to send a critical letter about every issue I see in every paper I read, I'd spend my time doing nothing else, and the journals would be filled with my letters to the editor with no room for new articles. 

And we're all adults here. It's expected that scientists read papers critically; that's part of our job. That means we all find things to criticize. Finding a problem in a published paper isn't a shocking, scandalous thing. It's like a toll collector breaking a $20 bill, a minor technical part of your job. It would be condescending of me to assume that I'm the only person who noticed the issues in question, and that it's up to me to save my colleagues from their stupidity and ignorance. 

Finally, when I do respond to publications that need criticizing, I rarely phrase my responses that way. For example, several years ago I read an interesting paper in my field that, I thought, made a significant error in its assumptions. To show that, I repeated some of their experiments, adding in the missing controls, and then extended the work to show where the corrected observations led. I didn't publish as a criticism of the previous work (which was from researchers who I know and admire and who have done a lot of great stuff). I published it as a paper that can stand on its own, noting the previous work in passing but not making a big deal of the mistake. Hopefully, if I ever make a mistake (unlikely!) my colleagues will correct me in the same way. Science is hard, and it shouldn't be like a hockey goalie, where every time you make a mistake a buzzer goes off and thirty thousand people yell at you.