Thursday, November 1, 2012

Why You Should Reject the “Rejection Improves Impact” Meme

http://caseybergman.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/why-you-should-reject-the-rejection-improves-impact-meme/

Over the last two weeks, a meme has been making the rounds in the scientific twittersphere that goes something like “Rejection of a scientific manuscript improves its eventual impact”.  This idea is based a recent analysis of patterns of manuscript submissionreported in Science by Calcagno et al., which has been actively touted in the scientific press and seems to have touched a nerve with many scientists.

To be fair, Science Insider does acknowledge that the effect is weak: “previously rejected papers had a slight bump in the number of times they were cited by other papers”

Calcagno, V., Demoinet, E., Gollner, K., Guidi, L., Ruths, D., & de Mazancourt, C. (2012). Flows of Research Manuscripts Among Scientific Journals Reveal Hidden Submission Patterns Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1227833

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