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

Surprisingly?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What about in mathematics?

[oneiros27]

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)