Rejected Papers Get More Citations When Eventually Published

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.

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

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