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Does Journal Peer Review Miss Best and Brightest?
sciencehabit writes: A study published today indicates that the scientific peer review system does a reasonable job of predicting the eventual interest in most papers, but it may fail when it comes to identifying really game-changing research. Papers that were accepted outright by one of the three elite journals tended to garner more citations than papers that were rejected and then published elsewhere (abstract). And papers that were rejected went on to receive fewer citations than papers that were approved by an editor. But there is a serious chink in the armor: All 14 of the most highly cited papers in the study were rejected by the three elite journals, and 12 of those were bounced before they could reach peer review. The finding suggests that unconventional research that falls outside the established lines of thought may be more prone to rejection from top journals.
University level:
I Just finished my PhD at Imperial College, a world leading institute, and all they care about is incremental research that industry will fund. New ideas just get thrown away until another university does the ground work and the IC jumps in with bigger wallets and then takes it on/steals it.
UK Government funding:
If you have a new or interesting approach forget about getting grant funding, you only get money in the UK if the work has already been proven to be successful. Quite literally the funding peer review of your grant can be rejected because you don't have the end answer (with a high degree of certainty) the research would give.
Original ideology of peer review is great, what is being practiced today (at least in the UK) is broken.
It is impotant to get papers through to good journals for several reasons. Many, or dare I say most, senior scientists (and those they train) still use antiquated systems for getting their information: Rather than using an RSS reader, say, they mostly rely on hearing about new stuff through conferences and networking, or by reading the few (top) journals of their field. Eventually the information may come out, but by that time someone else might already have independently come up with the same idea and managed to publish it at a higher rated journal. Guess who gets cited and remembered.
The bigger problem, though, is that careers are on the line here. In science, as in any job, you need to produce and the metric used is usually a combination of the number of publictions and the impact factor of the journals they were accepted to. Higgs' seminal paper that got him the Nobel prize was, unless I misremember, rejected and he published in a secondary journal. He was not very prolific either, and was indeed very close to being fired by the university.