Nature: An examination of manuscript flows for bioscience articles reveals that articles published on a second submission attempt are more frequently cited than those accepted on their first submission. Vincent Calcagno of the French Institute for Agricultural Research in Sophia-Antipolis and his colleagues looked at more than 80 000 articles published between 2006 and 2008. One finding reinforces the idea that papers rejected by higher-impact journals generally tend to be published in lower-impact journals. But 75% of papers appear in the journal to which they are first submitted. Regardless of journal impact, the articles that were initially rejected were more highly cited on average within 3–6 years of their publication. Calcagno believes that is because of the impact of peer review and the resulting improvements in the articles.
I have a different hypothesis. The papers that are boring repetition of old ideas are published immediately and rapidly become irrelevant. The papers that contain novel ideas find resistance in the referees, but then they are more interesting are are cited. This is at least the case for my own paper, for which there is an astonishing inverse correlation between citation success and difficulty of overcoming referee’s closure of mind.