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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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A very good site to monitor is Retraction Watch - https://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/
They not only follow retractions in journals, but dig into them, and track them to other papers and publications by the same authors.
For those of us in industry, we forget there are areas of Academia that are dog-eat-dog, publish or perish.
Under such pressures, authors make up data, manipulate data and/or images, and more.
Take a look at Retraction Watch for the sordid details -- for us outsiders, it's like a soap opera for the geeky set!
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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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
the search for legitimacy of their own leads them to ultimately consider only papers that completely agree with conventional wisdom and support the already big names and big theories.
Not to mention that the reviewers that are willing to review for smaller journals are usually in the same boat—younger faculty trying to get a leg up—and subject to the same pressures and tendencies.
But even at the large and important journals, there is a tendency to dismiss really interesting papers unless they come from a large name / large name school. You'd better have a long track record and big names behind you or you won't get serious consideration, even if your work is sound and earth-shattering. It's just a matter of the probability of returns on the investment of labor.
I say all of this as someone that did sit as a managing editor on an academic journal and that has been a part of the review process for any number of articles.
There are serious inherent biases built into the system, both for good and for bad.
Much more important to my eye is the fact that this is all free labor but earns the publishers huge profits and costs the schools huge dollars. It's only a matter of time before the current system is overturned. Right now, schools pay money to faculty to write papers, pay money to faculty to review papers, then pay lots of money for the journals. Yet all of the authority of the paper comes from the faculty and from the institution, and circulation is limited to academics because articles run $30-$60 a pop for public access. It's only a matter of time until they cut out the middleman, save tons of costs, and grow their audience at the same time.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW