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Rejected Papers Get More Citations When Eventually Published
scibri writes "In a study of more than 80,000 bioscience papers, researchers have illuminated the usually hidden flows of papers from journal to journal before publication. Surprisingly, they found that papers published after having first been rejected elsewhere receive significantly more citations on average than ones accepted on first submission. There were a few other surprises as well...Nature and Science publish more papers that were initially rejected elsewhere than lower-impact journals do. So there is apparently some reason to be patient with your paper's critics — they will do you good in the end."
Peer review *does* work. Yes, part of its job is to filter out the poor papers that don't deserve publication. That's the obvious part. But I've gotten plenty of papers back with comments like "deserves publication, but X, Y, and Z need to be fixed". Or even "rejected, but if X were addressed, should be reconsidered", and so on. So, you go off and do X, Y, and Z, resubmit, and you've got a better paper because you've addressed the critical comments. Good papers are ones that incorporate constructive criticism, so it makes sense those might eventually get cited more. Also, if it's a paper that was rejected somewhere, then it might be something controversial that people want to argue about. So, publish a paper that makes a claim some people don't agree with (hence the rejection), and those critics will publish their own paper slagging the original one. Putting it another way, in order to say someone else's paper is full of crap, you have to cite it, and if a lot of people are saying it's crap, then you'll get a lot of citations :-)
Peer review isn't perfect, but the described pattern makes sense. What I'm surprised at is their ability to statistically detect these patterns given all the other variables involved, but I guess a sample size of 80000 helps.
I haven't done a lot of publishing in open literature, but many times, the papers that fly through the vetting process with little effort are are on topics that are somewhat straightforward/trivial. And would thus not be as likely to be useful as a citation. The interesting topic raises many more questions and is more likely to require multiple tries to get through the review, but ultimately is more useful and more likely to get a citation.
Brett
"So there is apparently some reason to be patient with your paper's critics — they will do you good in the end."
I have a different possible viewpoint. The papers that are most likely to be rejected are the ones that are controversial because they challenge the status quo. But once they're accepted, they're game changers. And since they're game changers, and the first publications with the new viewpoint, they're cited disproportionately frequently by follow up work.
(formatted correctly this time)
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The conclusion the journals would like you to reach, and it may explain some of the effect. Seems to me likely the larger effect is simply that papers which break new ground tend to be controversial to old guard, thus accumulate rejections, but when and if finally published they also tend to accumulate more citations as well, as even the old guard will then have to cite in their rebuttals.
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This is one of those "I came on here to say this but you said it better" posts.
The only study they site about how much editing is done between submissions seems to indicate "not much at all".
Also, this could explain the prevalence of Nature and Science in the study. Risky papers may be rejected by the orthodoxy of more specialized journals. Nature and Science may avoid that kind of orthodoxy simply by having a broader array of reviewers than a more specialized journal might.
Pick a completely zany example in a field I know nothing about: You've done cutting edge work on the transport of lipids in palm fronds. There aren't that many people in the field, and most of them have been following a line of reasoning that lipids are transported by osmosis, as there has been some evidence of that. You have the hypothesis that lipids are transported by tiny aphids. You do some interesting lab work, that seems to support the hypothesis. The results are supportable, publishable, but not entirely definitive -- you know, statistically significant, but there's really a lot more work to be done before anyone can say you've really proven your hypothesis correct.
You submit your paper to a botany journal. They have it reviewed by a bunch of palm frond experts. All of them have studied palm fronds very closely. They mostly adhere to the unproven pet theory of osmosis. They do not consciously reject your paper because it contradicts their pet theory, but between the kinda shaky results, and their unconscious bias, it gets rejected.
Now you submit to Nature. They only have a couple palm frond experts in their stable, so they have a fern expert and a deciduous leaf expert review it. Neither the fern expert nor the deciduous expert have any unconscious bias. They think the whole thing seems pretty interesting, and worthy of broader discussion. So it gets approved. Now that the whole palm frond field has seen your work, a couple guys start trying to replicate your work, adding their own twists. They come up with supporting evidence and publish, with a reference to your work. A couple more guys come up with evidence that supports a different hypothesis. Even if you end up having been wrong at this point, your work gets referenced because it is what stimulated them to do their work. Let's say they discovered a third mechanism, that seems to explain transport even better. This third mechanism is unrelated to osmosis, so few of the osmosis studies are being referenced. But because your work stimulated the whole line of inquiry, your wrong study still gets lots of references.
(I added the part at the end about the work ending up being wrong just to illustrate that risky scientific invetigation doesn't have to end up being right in order to get referenced a lot. It just has to stimulate inquiry in a different direction such that people keep referencing the original study. A paper that just advances the field in an orthodox direction may still be great science, but may get lost in a sheaf of other similar studies advancing the field in that similar direction.)