Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal

news18.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 71 posts

Re: Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal

#4

Post by chrisseaton »

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.

Re: Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal

#6

Post by JorgeGT »

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.

Re: Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal

#7

Post by tombert »

chrisseaton wrote: post #4

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 eno…

It mentions in the article that Nature said:

> 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.

Re: Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal

#8

Post by shadowgovt »

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.

Re: Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal

#9

Post by throwaway_law »

chrisseaton wrote: post #4

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 eno…

>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.

Post reply on HN