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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

#31

Post by rjf72 »

throwaway_law wrote: post #9
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: -review…

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.

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

#32

Post by PhasmaFelis »

panpanna wrote: post #30
btilly wrote: post #16

That'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.

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.

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

#34

Post by dr_coffee »

btilly wrote: post #16

That'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…

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.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26325464/

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0006291X78...

(The BBRC text is paywalled sorry)

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

#35

Post by throwaway_law »

mcguire wrote: post #18
throwaway_law wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

"Obviously this is a very small set?" 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.

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

#36

Post by t_serpico »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #29
southerndrift wrote: post #28

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.

All true. But the unintended consequence might be, that journals become publishers only of incremental, safe minor papers?

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.

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

#37

Post by throwaway_law »

andrepd wrote: post #26
throwaway_law wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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-subj…

>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.

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

#38

Post by panpanna »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #32
panpanna wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider this next time you have a good idea and everyone in the room very loudly questions you.

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.

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

#39

Post by jacquesm »

dr_coffee wrote: post #34
btilly wrote: post #16

That'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…

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?…

> (The BBRC text is paywalled sorry)

No problem, I think this is the paper you were looking for:

https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.bbrc.2015.08.109

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

#40

Post by opo »

doubleunplussed wrote: post #24
planetzero wrote: post #22

They 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.

All of the Nobel prizes were established after his death.
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