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.
That is indeed an extreme example, given how matter of factly they teach transposons in molecular bio these days.
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.
There are many prestigious/important journals within specific fields with very low IF. For instance in acoustics the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America or Acta Acustica united with Acustica.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I suspect that for every revolutionary idea that's initially dismissed as crackpot nonsense, there's a thousand dismissed ideas that actually are crackpot nonsense. It's hard to draw strong general conclusions from looking at outliers.
Sure but looking back, I can also tell you that almost all great ideas I have ever had were initially rejected.
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.
The problem is that impossible seeming results tend to get rejected out of hand no matter how carefully they were done, or how easy to replicate.
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 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.
It is true that most impossible results are experimental error of one sort or another.
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.
All data should be scrutinized. If you are going to blindly accept data that matches prediction, than don't waste resources collecting the data you aren't going to use -- just use the theory and don't lie about verifyit it.
The charge of electron was incorrectly reported in many studies for many years because scientists refused to publish results that contradicted Millikan's incorrect result, and happily published incorrect results because they matched the accepted theori of the time. This is one of Feynman's favorite stories to illustrate Cargo Cult science.
> But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
It doesn't say it explicitly in the article, but I guess the idea behind people sharing this story is to laugh at the original reviewer's foolishness, ignorance, or arrogance for rejecting Nobel quality work.
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.
> If the paper is too specialized for something general like Nature, then they probably shouldn't publish it.
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".
The papers are operating on a schedule and if the reviewer can’t understand it and there’s 10 other papers fighting for the same spot in the journal with positive feedback then it’s just the nature of the business.
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.
> > 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
Perhaps there's too much competition because there's not enough space? Science is not an industry notorious for excess in investment capacity...
Modern journals have no limit imposed by the process of publishing physical objects. Space is limited simply in the sense that Nature wants to maintain a reputation for publishing impressive/important results, and readers have very finite time and energy, so Nature sets a high bar for acceptance.
Yes I know, but the size is not meaningfully constrained by the physical cost of producing or transporting the magazine. The scarce resource is the readers attention. There may also be value in creating artificial scarcity, given that they have something like a status monopoly.
I would also add that journals like Nature or Science are aiming to publish high quality, high impact work in a manner that is highly specific (i.e they can be confident such work is high quality and high impact) and hopefully communicable to a somewhat broad audience. Ground breaking ideas out of left field may need some more time to mature before such journals would be comfortable publishing such work.
In other words, journals try to predict the future (impact) while the Nobel committee looks at the past (impact).
More specifically, journals like significant advances in known fields (eg, doubling the efficiency of solar panels), while the Nobel committee likes research that opens up a new field (eg, looking for exo planets).
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.
>Rejection is usually a case of 'I'm not sufficiently sure this is good enough given the information I have in front of me'
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.
To the best of my knowledge 8 papers were rejected that ultimately won the prize...over 500 Nobel Prizes have been awarded so I am not sure why you expect papers to get 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.
The paper is irrelevant. It's about the discovery. And a person who makes a Nobel-worthy discovery is generally not going to go "Dang, didn't get published. Guess I'll move on."
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.
Short of unlimited space to include all articles anyone possibly submits without any standard required, what do you think people should do instead except apply some subjective editorial judgement? It wouldn't be a journal if someone wasn't applying judgement - it'd just be a vast paper repository which isn't really the same thing.
-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?
>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.
Nature also rejected Fermi's paper on weak interaction ("contained speculations too remote from reality to be of interest to the reader") and Kreb's paper about the citric acid cycle ("It is undesirable to accept further letters at the present time") — both investigation would end winning the Nobel.
It's inspiring to observe how long the path can be between initial forays (or even middle-career forays) and publicly-recognized success.
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.
In Miranda's case, it's a weakness in the format. He couldn't really publish a string of 30 songs about Hamilton's life over a 10 year career as a pop bard, but plenty of musicians do that on similar works of art.
But packing them into one blockbuster she works.
* Then again, people do it in TV format, like Flight of the Conchords and Crazy Ex Girlfriend.
Looks like most people here recognize it's silly to think Nature was foolish for not always recognizing Nobel-prize-worthy work when it first appeared. (The journal might be foolish for plenty of other reasons, of course.) But for those who are still surprised, you should just think of this like making fun of VCs for not recognizing the future success of AirBnB (or whatever your perferred example start-up that seemed weird/unpromising but turned out to be wildly successful). This stuff always seems obvious in hindsight.
What I'm trying to understand is: do large numbers of people believe the work that goes on to the Nobel Prize should be recognized as such when it is originally published?
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 there are many things that, when published in the context of the day, are not distinguishable from other work in terms of "Nobelity". It seems like most impact is measured decades after an initial technology is discovered, reported, and published. CRISPR seems like a relative outlier (once the basic technique was perfected, it went from "nothing" to "everything" in just a few years, and has now completely changed the nature of biomedical research).
CRISPR isn't an outlier, it's a product of our modern fast moving tech world. If CRISPR were invented in 1950, all else equal,it would have moved much more slowly.
> The journal in 1992 had concluded that Ratcliffe's study was unfit for publication as the direction of research was something which was beyond their understanding.
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,”
I always assumed this was standard, at least for all the larger journals.
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.
Hasn't Maxwell not mentioned Maxwell's equations when giving a speech about the state of the art of science? If a great scientist can be unsure about a theory, it's not surprising that an average reviewer can be, too.
From Hilbert's perspective, he did a lot of work that he cared about, but one random thing got his name on it out of proportion to his own sense of what his important about himself. That's disorienting.
Gauss avoided this problem by getting everything named after him.
you can think of every journal having some set 'perceived value' and 'safety' parameters (e.g some journals will tune down safety to allow flashier papers to enter while others will tune up safety at the expense of flashiness). there is basically a push and pull between value and safety.
That is why need arxiv like pre-print system for every scientific field, So even if a paper is rejected it is still widely available, readable and reference able.
*Nobel, and for what it's worth, the peace prize was added after Alfred Nobel's death and is considered by many not to serve the same purpose at the other Nobel prizes, and so it has a different reputation. It is sometimes used as a nudge to people who have the power to do good things, rather than as recognition after the fact.
Well, he established them in his will. I was under the impression that the Peace prize was not in his will, but I just looked it up on wikipedia and it was. Looks like I got it confused with the "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences", which shares his name and is administered by the same committee, but was established by others.
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.