As a reviewer, it’s when you see one of those papers where the impact is not so clear, and at best is extremely incremental or just a slightly different take on

As a reviewer, it’s when you see one of those papers where the impact is not so clear, and at best is extremely incremental or just a slightly different take on something that has already been done. You can tell a grad student spent a lot of effort to come up with this. If you reject it, you’re just going to make his/her graduation that much harder. It’s like looking at a very involved homework. The alternative is to gatekeep the field a lot more and make people drop from their PhD midway through.