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."

Comments

Peer review doing its job

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Another possible mechanism for this

[Brett Buck]

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

Alternate Viewpoint

[merlinokos]

"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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Re:Surprisingly?

[Arker]

Not at all. Papers that were previously rejected benefit from additional, careful revisions by their authors, therefore they end being of higher quality than they would have.

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.