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Scientific Papers That Were Rejected Before Going on to Win a Nobel Prize (2016)
- dagw 7y agoGoing through the reasons for these rejections, most seem perfectly reasonable, and few are complete rejections. One was rejected simply because that journal had too large a backlog to handle new submissions. One journal didn't like the authors title and published it after the author agreed to change the title. There are a couple of cases where a journal said the topic wasn't really relevant to their journal, and the work then went on to get published in more relevant journal. In one case they said we like your work and think you're on to something, but your conclusion is too strongly worded given the data you presented. In no case did the journal or reviewer state that they thought the paper or research was straight up wrong.
- cwingrav 7y agoVery true. I think many that are not in the scientific community do not understand that almost all papers in top journals are given "revise and resubmit" status, so people can fix small to large issues before being reviewed again. This process makes the paper more understandable, not just to the reviewers, but to the community at large. It is not a perfect process, but definitely one that has improved writings as a whole.
- etrautmann 7y agoI’ve never heard of a paper that was accepted without revisions after peer review. There’s always some (thoigh frequently many) requested changes, but never once have I seen three reviewers all sign off without having a single suggestion.
- ghaff 7y agoIt seems almost inherent to the process. I don't read or write journal articles. But I'm sometimes asked to be a reviewer on a book proposal and I fairly frequently review docs of various types at work. If I'm just one peripheral person on a long list I might read quickly through and say "Looks fine to me." But if I'm really reviewing something, I almost feel that I'm expected to at least find some nit-picks--as well as anything really substantial of course. It's pretty rare that I will be "No comments" on a first-pass review.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoThe insulin-antigen one did claim it was not proven true. Is that close enough to 'wrong'?
- dagw 7y agoI can't really judge, but by the sounds of it the paper didn't provide enough evidence to prove that it was true, or at least didn't make it obvious that it was true. They even admit that the data presented was "suggestive" that it might be true. This is something you see all the time. Someone does a limited experiment, gets the result they where hoping for, and then get super excited and carried away and claim that their entire thesis has been proven true. I've rejected (or rather sent back for extensive revision) papers myself based on this, even when my gut feeling was that their conclusion was probably correct. Often the paper comes back with a more moderated conclusion and then gets published without a problem.
- manjana 7y agoAre sensationalistic science sites allowed?
- _pmf_ 7y agoIf it satisfies the inclusivity charade.
- tiemand 7y agoThis reminds me of something I recently saw on Netflix. In the documentary about physicist Abdus Salam, he sent Wolfgang Pauli a paper on parity violations. Pauli replied saying something like "find something better to do". Later, two Chinese physicist went on to get the Nobel Prize for that same theory. Pauli later apologised. https://www.sps.ch/en/articles/milestones-in-physics/the-fall-of-parity-2/ https://www.sps.ch/en/articles/milestones-in-physics/the-fal... https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81191195 https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81191195
- shatnersbassoon 7y agoBear in mind that a lot of papers are initially rejected by journals simply because the journals want another $99 submission fee.
- sideshowb 7y agoWow is that a thing? I have submitted to many journals and none wanted fees before acceptance.
- dagw 7y agoThere is whole cottage industry of journals that will publish basically anything in exchange for a submission fee, being kept alive by desperate PhD students who need a couple of more papers published so they can just get their degree and get out of there.
- shatnersbassoon 7y agoWhen it happened to me it was a "reputable" high-impact neuroscience journal, not Cross-stitch Monthly.
- webel0 7y agoGood article but it seems to be copied near-verbatim from [1]. There is a tiny “H/T” at the bottom of the article. Suggest that the link point to the original source. [1] https://www.authorea.com/users/8850/articles/117724-nope-8-rejected-papers-that-won-the-nobel-prize https://www.authorea.com/users/8850/articles/117724-nope-8-r...
- QuesnayJr 7y agoDo physicists really consider the editor saying "change the title" a rejection? If the only request I got from an editor was "change the title" I would be popping the champagne.
- taneq 7y ago"Nobel Prize-winning physicist offered opportunity to re-word awkward title" doesn't get clicks though.
- magicalhippo 7y agoFrom what I gather there are essentially four outcomes to the review: accepted, accepted after minor modifications, rejected pending resubmission after substantial modifications, fully rejected. Minor modifications shouldn't require a new full review cycle, maybe just the editor takes a look, or just some quick check with reviewer to see if they accept the change. Rejecting pending resubmission is for larger changes which require a more thorough review, but the journal is still interested in publishing the paper. This might be a section that requires more explanation, for example more details on how samples were controlled for other factors. Also as mentioned a full rejection doesn't automatically mean the paper is rubbish, it could just be the journal doesn't consider it a good fit or similar. It's not uncommon for a paper to go through multiple rejections before getting published. At least that's my understanding based on a close friend who publishes papers, feel free to correct me.
- phalangion 7y agoYou've pretty much got it, but a paper receiving either of the "accept" outcomes in the first round is extremely rare. I know of zero. Your third, "rejected pending resubmission after modifications" is the normal path for papers that go on to be accepted. Often this is called a "revise and resubmit" or R&R.
- dekhn 7y agono, "change the title" is not a rejection. The entire article we're discussing is based on a silly narrative that somehow the literature is supposed to act as a binary classification filter for nobel prize winning work.
- kratom_sandwich 7y agoFor those who are interested in a similar article for economics, I can recommend this one from the Journal of Economic Perspectives, which is freely available online: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.8.1.165 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.8.1.165 (PDF)
- kyberias 7y agoIf a scientific paper that may result in winning a Nobel prize never gets rejected, the criteria for acceptance is too lenient. If a scientific paper that contains rubbish never gets accepted, the criteria for acceptance is too strict.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoHow about, just shoddy? Don't need to assume perfect reviewers, just confused/ignorant/bad ones.
- evanb 7y ago> You might not have heard much about NMR spectroscopy, but it's responsible for revealing details about the structure and dynamics of molecules - something that's incredibly handy for chemists and biochemists. Also it's the technology driving magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Leaving out 'nuclear' was just a marketing tactic to keep people from being afraid.
- ncmncm 7y agoYes, this comment floored me. Did they really not know that MRI used NMR? I got to do an NMR experiment as an undergrad, a decade before MRI, and it seemed miraculous then. I remember reading a speculation that a 3D imaging machine ought to be possible (in IEEE Spectrum, back when it was often ground-breaking), and was astounded when five years later they had done it and were selling them. Still haven't had a scan, yet.
- mensetmanusman 7y agoAs a materials scientist I have to vote for quasicrystals. On top of not receiving the Nobel prize, Dan Shechtman had to observe and decrypt the meaning of diffraction patterns that were so strange people thought his machine was malfunctioning. Humans have no known way of producing quasicrystals in bulk, but amazingly we have found that meteorites (e.g. the Khatyrka) can have them. Something about traveling through deep space for millions of years... Quasicrystals can be modeled as crystals in the N+1’th dimension. Princeton mathematicians recently simulated a 1D crystal where the location of the atoms on the 1D grid was set to the first few tens of millions of prime numbers. The resulting diffraction pattern was quasi-crystalline...
- ablekh 7y agoSorry for the off-topic note, but I would appreciate if you could comment on my recent poll here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21187659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21187659) and, if you know other MSE people on HN, please ping them, if possible. Thank you very much in advance!
- glofish 7y agoAs framed above the story is little more than make-you-feel-good if you get rejection. The data makes sense only in the following contexts: - How many accepted papers did win the Nobel Prize? - How many rejected papers did not win the Nobel prize? - How many rejected papers are utter batshit nonsense? Other way to say it, what is the likelihood that a rejected paper is Nobel prize-worthy? ...
- gmiller123456 7y agoOr, how many Nobel Prize papers required no revisions after the first submission.
- ncmncm 7y agoI read it as being about the incompetence of reviewers. Considering the dreck that does get published, rejecting Nobel-level work should be an enduring disgrace. Edit: had forgotten about submission fees. Yes, those were real. $100 was a lot more then, particularly for a grad student. Competion from open-access journals has been so good that people are forgetting how terrible it was. But paywall journals are still very, very bad. IMO it is irresponsible to use one.
- Atlas00 7y agoI remember hearing that the original graphene paper was initially declined by Nature because the reviewers claimed that isolating a 2D material was impossible. I feel that's a more firm rejection than many of those listed here.
- jihadjihad 7y agoOne they missed was Barry Marshall and Robin Warren's research on a bacterial cause of peptic ulcers [0]. Their paper was rejected from the Gastroenterological Society of Australia, who "rated it in the bottom 10% of those they received in 1983." They both became Nobel laureates in 2005. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall
- dekhn 7y agoTo be honest, if I was a reviewer, and somebody sent the first NMR paper to me, I'd reject it. It was a truly crazy idea that came out of war tech. Even when I did NMR in the 90s, it was still pretty crazy: you have a supercooled superconducting magnet and put a sample into a spinning buffer of air, then bombard it with radiowaves and listen for the echo. The echo, if carefully deconvolved, provides unbelievably fine details on the electrically shielded nuclear environment. Did I mention it was a 23T superconducting supercooled magnet, where you inject charge (electrons) and they swirl around without neglible resistance for months at a time?
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoConfused. Isn't that exactly like so many other papers involving Big Physics? Large equipment, complex math, remarkable clarity, new/surprising results? Don't know what about 'needing a big magnet' precludes this being a valid physics paper.
- jchallis 7y ago23T is a big magnet. Were you at the high field lab in Tallahassee?
- dekhn 7y agoAh, no, I was just quoting the field strength of what used to be the largest magnet. Personally I used a 600MHz. It's still weird to have your head below a massive magnet and have to tune analog electronics for impedence matching because there aren't any shielding techs for digital electronics that can survive the field strength.
- rurban 7y agoThat's the problem when hiring reviewers straight from Wikipedia or Stackoverflow. The horizon is very low then.
- datavirtue 7y agoAll good ideas face little more than rejection and resistance.