Rejecting good papers is different from accepting bad ones. False negatives (the former) don't waste my time as a reader whereas false positives might. From my

Rejecting good papers is different from accepting bad ones. False negatives (the former) don't waste my time as a reader whereas false positives might. From my perspective the goal (which is a means to an end) is to improve the signal to noise ratio. Not to sound uncaring but I'm not losing sleep if someone got his feelings hurt because his groundbreaking paper was rejected by whatever high profile journal. That used to be potentially damaging but these days we have arxiv so you're still the original researcher to make the discovery. Suck it up and resubmit elsewhere. Rejection is an integral part of the job. To answer your earlier question I am sometimes a researcher and sometimes a layman. There are many reasons to consult the academic literature after all. > There's so many venues that except those in your specific domain you're probably not going to know what is a reputable venue from one that isn't. It's also not exactly an easy thing to verify. You are massively overthinking this. If of the last N nonsense results 5% of them were in a given journal you bet I'm going to remember the name and associate it with bullshit. I don't need to "verify" anything it's nothing more than a personal bias regarding a given publication venue. Nonetheless I find it (and quite a few other metrics) useful in rapidly prioritizing a list of hundreds of potentially relevant results when deciding which threads to start pulling on for my current question. That's a more important question than you might think (at least in my experience) since you generally don't have time to pull on all the threads and ask all the new questions that come up in doing so. It's a multi headed search that generally prioritizes depth so the quality of the commentary and references in the papers that you spend significant time on is of the utmost importance to the end result.