Rejected Papers Get More Citations When Eventually Published

This is one of those "I came on here to say this but you said it better" posts.

The only study they site about how much editing is done between submissions seems to indicate "not much at all".

Also, this could explain the prevalence of Nature and Science in the study. Risky papers may be rejected by the orthodoxy of more specialized journals. Nature and Science may avoid that kind of orthodoxy simply by having a broader array of reviewers than a more specialized journal might.

Pick a completely zany example in a field I know nothing about: You've done cutting edge work on the transport of lipids in palm fronds. There aren't that many people in the field, and most of them have been following a line of reasoning that lipids are transported by osmosis, as there has been some evidence of that. You have the hypothesis that lipids are transported by tiny aphids. You do some interesting lab work, that seems to support the hypothesis. The results are supportable, publishable, but not entirely definitive -- you know, statistically significant, but there's really a lot more work to be done before anyone can say you've really proven your hypothesis correct.

You submit your paper to a botany journal. They have it reviewed by a bunch of palm frond experts. All of them have studied palm fronds very closely. They mostly adhere to the unproven pet theory of osmosis. They do not consciously reject your paper because it contradicts their pet theory, but between the kinda shaky results, and their unconscious bias, it gets rejected.

Now you submit to Nature. They only have a couple palm frond experts in their stable, so they have a fern expert and a deciduous leaf expert review it. Neither the fern expert nor the deciduous expert have any unconscious bias. They think the whole thing seems pretty interesting, and worthy of broader discussion. So it gets approved. Now that the whole palm frond field has seen your work, a couple guys start trying to replicate your work, adding their own twists. They come up with supporting evidence and publish, with a reference to your work. A couple more guys come up with evidence that supports a different hypothesis. Even if you end up having been wrong at this point, your work gets referenced because it is what stimulated them to do their work. Let's say they discovered a third mechanism, that seems to explain transport even better. This third mechanism is unrelated to osmosis, so few of the osmosis studies are being referenced. But because your work stimulated the whole line of inquiry, your wrong study still gets lots of references.

(I added the part at the end about the work ending up being wrong just to illustrate that risky scientific invetigation doesn't have to end up being right in order to get referenced a lot. It just has to stimulate inquiry in a different direction such that people keep referencing the original study. A paper that just advances the field in an orthodox direction may still be great science, but may get lost in a sheaf of other similar studies advancing the field in that similar direction.)

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/v0DxZI7NDxQ/rejected-papers-get-more-citations-when-eventually-published

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