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.
Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal
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Re: Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal
#22They nominated Obama simply because he won over Bush and before he was even in office. I have lost faith in the Noble prize system as a whole.
Re: Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal
#23They nominated Obama simply because he won over Bush and before he was even in office. I have lost faith in the Noble prize system as a whole.
Obama never ran against Bush. 2008 was Obama and McCain and 2012 was Obama and Romney
Re: Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal
#24They nominated Obama simply because he won over Bush and before he was even in office. I have lost faith in the Noble prize system as a whole.
*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.
Re: Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 s…
Ah, I wasn't aware of that!
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".
Re: Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal
#26It 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: -review…
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 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?
Re: Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal
#27They nominated Obama simply because he won over Bush and before he was even in office. I have lost faith in the Noble prize system as a whole.
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Re: Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal
#28Hasn'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.
Re: Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal
#29Hasn'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.
All true. But the unintended consequence might be, that journals become publishers only of incremental, safe minor papers?
Re: Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal
#30That's nothing. 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…
Consider this next time you have a good idea and everyone in the room very loudly questions you.