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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."
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.
Papers initially rejected are improved based upon the reviews of outside critics. It seems this means they end up being better papers overall. Who'da thunk it!
As a PhD student I was advised early on that you learn to love the rejections.
I want to know how Rejecta Mathematica stacks up to the others.
(for those unfamiliar with it ... they only take papers that have already been rejected somewhere else, or when the author doesn't want to make the changes that the peer-reviewer is insisting on)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Perhaps 'game changers' is an exaggeration, but only papers that make minor extensions to the existing literature are accepted on first submission. In my (ex) field, papers that challenge a certain view get their share of flak from the reviewers. I've seen papers being shot down (see what I did there?) because the reviewers belonged to a different school. It's of course not always the case, but it does happen too often. One of the reasons is that such papers usually get reviewed by at least one of the opponents, or someone closely involved. Consequently, when such papers get accepted, they generate replies, and thus citations, in contrast to the papers that are in line with the main view.
I think the conclusion that the GP has a good point and that the conclusion "peer review works" cannot be drawn on.