Expect ground-breaking discoveries to get rejected initally

Coping with peer rejection

This editorial in Nature (16 October 2003 Volume 425 Issue No 6959) discusses how the scientific peer-review process struggles with assessing ground-breaking new ideas:

Coping with peer rejection

From the introduction:

“Accounts of rejected Nobel-winning discoveries highlight the conservatism in science. Despite their historical misjudgements, journal editors can help, but above all, visionaries will need sheer persistence.”

Here is the paper by Juan Miguel Capanario mentioned in the Nature article that finally found a journal that agreed to publish it in 2009!

Rejecting Nobel class articles and resisting Nobel class discoveries.

Daryl Bem’s advice on writing journal papers

Writing the Empirical Journal Article by Daryl Bem

How to handle getting a paper rejected the growth-mindset way

from Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck, p 224:

The other day one of my former grad students told me a story. But first some background. In my field, when you submit a research paper for publication, that paper often represents years of work. Some months later you receive your reviews: ten or so pages of criticism—single-spaced. If the editor still thinks the paper has potential, you will be invited to revise it and resubmit it provided you can address every criticism.

My student reminded me of the time she had sent her thesis research to the top journal in our field. When the reviews came back, she was devastated. She had been judged—the work was flawed and, by extension, so was she. Time passed, but she couldn’t bring herself to go near the reviews again or work on the paper.

Then I told her to change her mindset. “Look,” I said, “it’s not about you. That’s their job. Their job is to find every possible flaw. Your job is to learn from the critique and make your paper even better.” Within hours she was revising her paper, which was warmly accepted. She tells me: “I never felt judged again.  Never. Every time I get that critique, I tell myself ‘Oh, that’s their job,’ and I get to work immediately on my job.”