Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal
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The most extreme such example is that everything that Barbara McClintock published for decades about jumping genes was questioned because it seemed like an impossible result. It got so bad that she stopped even trying to submit papers for publication anywhere after 1953. Then in the 1960s and 1970s the mechanics of transposons was discovered and she became hailed as a pioneer and was awarded the Nobel.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_McClintock for more.
For a long time I thought this was due to poor presentation. Then one day it hit me: the reason boss/coworker doesn't get it is the same reason why he could not come up with the idea himself.
My point is that with time, you can look back at ideas that turned out to be great and recall how they were initially received.
Rejection is not an indicator for the merit of an idea.
This is an extreme example of that, and should stand as a cautionary tale that data should be believed especially when it is in conflict with theory. Rather than being rejected and ignored.
This is a terrible sentiment and it needs to stop spreading with these articles about Nobel rejections.
Noticing that your data is in conflict with theory is the best way of realizing that you have made a mistake. Go back to your analysis and work through it until you realize what you did wrong. If you can't find the mistake, then share it with your colleagues/PI, and get them to tell you what you did wrong. If all of their ideas don't explain your result, then you may have found an interesting finding, but you should probably triple check your work and then try to reproduce the finding in new data.
But it is a systemic failure that biologists broadly rejected a result out of hand that had been successfully replicated many times, at multiple labs, over decades. And the attitude that you describe is part of why it happened.
Data that does not fit in existing paradigms should be scrutinized with extra care, not rejected out of hand.
Carl Sagan.
When we couldn't get a paper published, my old PI would always joke, "There's always BBRC!", referring to the journal biochemical and biophysical research communications. The impact factor was and still is quite low, and it would make the post docs bristle when he said it.
But I once asked him, why BBRC? and he explained that Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Herschko published their first paper on ubiquitinylation (how proteins get tagged for degradation in the proteasome) in that journal [1,2]. It won them a Nobel prize 26 years later and exploded into a huge field. You just never know sometimes.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26325464/
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0006291X78...
(The BBRC text is paywalled sorry)
No problem, I think this is the paper you were looking for:
But it isn't that simple. What was the context in which the original work was presented? Does the Nobel Committee know more now than the reviewer did at the time? Maybe the original paper wasn't written well enough to sufficiently explain the full potential of the idea?
Rejection is usually a case of 'I'm not sufficiently sure this is good enough given the information I have in front of me', not 'I'm positive this isn't good enough even with hindsight from the future'.
I think the tone is a little unfair and unreasonable.
> Given the discrepancy mentioned by reviewer 1, we have sadly concluded, on balance, that your paper would be better placed in a more specialised journal, particularly given the competition for space
This doesn't necessarily seem bad to me, and doesn't seem like a criticism of the paper. If the paper is too specialized for something general like Nature, then they probably shouldn't publish it.
If I were to write some paper about distributed computing on RISC-V chips and submit it to Nature, they would probably reject it because it's not really on-topic to what they usually publish. It wouldn't be a criticism of how good the paper is.
A lot of external success is timing and luck. The legitimate progress stuff will eventually find a voice and in most cases respect will be given retroactively.
Perhaps there's too much competition because there's not enough space? Science is not an industry notorious for excess in investment capacity...
FYI, this is a well-known polite euphemism. Papers aren't put in Nature because they avoid being too specialized. (Try reading a Nature paper today, and compare with a paper in a specialized journal a few decades ago.) They are put in Nature because they seem super impressive, and so even people outside the subfield might care. Saying "this paper is more appropriate for a specialized journal" just means "this paper isn't impressive/important enough for people to care, so we're not going to publish it in Nature, the highest-status journal".
Always weird to learn a new bit of vernacular. I suppose "more appropriate for a specialized journal" is the academic equivalent to "don't call us, we'll call you".
Last week there were a few articles about the rejection of numerous articles/papers that would go on to win the Nobel Prize.
Obviously this is a very small set, but goes to show how easily Nobel Prize winning papers could have been lost to history.
The rejections include everything from:
-reviewers not liking the name of the paper (politics/subjectivity at its worst...I think the journal was trying to take an active role in the propagation of the prevailing terms regarding the subject matter)
-Not the right journal for the topic (quasi-subjective and potentially political)
-a backlog of articles to be published (maybe a little subjective, not sure if the examiner(s)/publisher(s) could have shuffled things around, but that would get back into subjectivity/politics)
In most cases, as you can imagine, the authors were disheartened and frustrated. Some never even published again as a result of these experiences. To me it just makes me wonder how many papers/articles could/would/should have won the Nobel Prize but for some rejection, and as a result how much time/effort has been lost.
Nobel Prizes, by definition, are given for groundbreaking results. Almost by definition, most "groundbreaking" results are wrong. Even given everything else as equal, it is unsurprising that Nobel-winning results are rejected at least once.
Again the basis of these rejections were not on the merits (or results) as you suggest, rather, because of issues with names of the papers, backlog, and deferring to other journals which may be better fits for the topic.
-reviewers not liking the name of the paper (politics/subjectivity at its worst...I think the journal was trying to take an active role in the propagation of the prevailing terms regarding the subject matter)
Not a rejection then, just a suggestion to change a shitty and confusing title to a better one. Do that and you're golden.
-Not the right journal for the topic (quasi-subjective and potentially political)
How is "your research is not into the topic of this journal" a "political" opinion?
Are you familiar at all with the 8 papers that were rejected and went on to win the Nobel Prize?
Example: Fermi's paper on weak interaction...rejected by Nature. The rejection was on the basis "to far removed from reality to be of interest to readers", it was only the discovery of 1 of the 4 fundamental forces of nature.
It appears the rejection on this basis are often just a form rejection in many cases that allows the journal to reject a paper outright rather than provide any explanation/feedback.
Then again I suppose nothing like a reviewer being able to point to a Nobel Prize winner and chuckle to themselves that this person isn't even smart enough to identify the proper journal to publish their work in.
Extreme success tends to involve some extreme personalities with a very high frequency. Einstein, as one of the best examples, wrote his initial revolutionary papers in his spare time while working as lower tier assistant inspector at a patent office because he could find no university that would take him on as a researcher. Even at the patent office he was passed over for promotion due a perception of inability. Suffice to say, he wasn't especially concerned with what other people thought about his capability.
In that light, maybe it's more surprising to see a Nobel-awarded piece of research was published in Nature than to see it was rejected by Nature.
This seems a relatively universal truism with only rare exceptions (too rare to bet one's future on, certainly). I'm reminded of the video of Lin Manuel-Miranda performing at the White House Poetry Jam in 2009 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNFf7nMIGnE].
The work he presented was already pretty well-polished, and the musical that included it wouldn't open for another six years.
* Then again, people do it in TV format, like Flight of the Conchords and Crazy Ex Girlfriend.
Put another way: could you train a binary classifier (NOBEL/NOTBEL) that predicted prizewinning status at journal submission time based on the information bits available in the article? (personally I really doubt it)
When you put it like that, no, obviously not, or at least not always.
On the other hand, a lot of academia is predicated on the idea that the quality and impact of research and by extension, the researcher, is immediately apparent, so we're "correctly" selecting and rewarding the best people. Stuff like this suggests that we're not, and the moves towards relentless up-or-out pipelines (with fixed times at each stage) might be counterproductive.
I think that this is a fair reason for rejecting a paper...
> “Given the discrepancy mentioned by reviewer 1, we have sadly concluded, on balance, that your paper would be better placed in a more specialised journal, particularly given the competition for space,”
Yes, that's kind of good advice too...
Similar to the way patents used to be. Expect to be rejected multiple times, while tweaking and submitting additional info. That's essentially what the editing process was.
In his defense, they were named after him by someone else. But it was still a funny irony.
Gauss avoided this problem by getting everything named after him.
Reviwers aren't all geniuses....