Journal rejection doesn’t imply lack of article importance

Science : A review of articles rejected from three top-tier medical journals—Annals of Internal Medicine, the BMJ, and the Lancet—reveals that some of the rejects that were published elsewhere have been cited more times than any of the accepted articles. Kyle Siler of the University of Toronto in Canada and his colleagues reviewed the histories of 1008 articles submitted to the three journals. They found that 722 were “desk rejected” before the peer-review stage, and of the ones that made it to peer review, only 62 were accepted. Of the total 946 articles that were rejected, 757 were eventually published in other journals. Siler’s team found that on average the 62 articles published in the top-tier publications were more frequently cited than the 757 published elsewhere. They also found that the articles that made it to peer review before being rejected were more highly cited than those that were rejected early on. However, the 14 most cited articles overall were among those that had been rejected by the three top-tier journals, and all but two before the peer-review stage. The study’s authors suggest several possible reasons for this: Articles about unconventional research may be more prone to rejection by the top-tier journals, highly technical articles tend to be cited less often even if their scientific value is greater than that of a less technical article, and a high citation count is not necessarily a sign of an article’s importance.