andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-834 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Sometimes when I submit an article to a journal it is accepted right away or with minor alterations. But many of my favorite articles were rejected or had to go through an exhausting series of revisions. For example, this influential article had a very hostile referee and we had to seriously push the journal editor to accept it. This one was rejected by one or two journals before finally appearing with discussion. This paper was rejected by the American Political Science Review with no chance of revision and we had to publish it in the British Journal of Political Science, which was a bit odd given that the article was 100% about American politics. And when I submitted this instant classic (actually at the invitation of the editor), the referees found it to be trivial, and the editor did me the favor of publishing it but only by officially labeling it as a discussion of another article that appeared in the same issue. Some of my most influential papers were accepted right
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Sometimes when I submit an article to a journal it is accepted right away or with minor alterations. [sent-1, score-0.466]
2 But many of my favorite articles were rejected or had to go through an exhausting series of revisions. [sent-2, score-0.557]
3 For example, this influential article had a very hostile referee and we had to seriously push the journal editor to accept it. [sent-3, score-0.788]
4 This one was rejected by one or two journals before finally appearing with discussion. [sent-4, score-0.319]
5 This paper was rejected by the American Political Science Review with no chance of revision and we had to publish it in the British Journal of Political Science, which was a bit odd given that the article was 100% about American politics. [sent-5, score-0.751]
6 And when I submitted this instant classic (actually at the invitation of the editor), the referees found it to be trivial, and the editor did me the favor of publishing it but only by officially labeling it as a discussion of another article that appeared in the same issue. [sent-6, score-0.858]
7 Some of my most influential papers were accepted right away but most of them faced serious opposition on the way to publication. [sent-7, score-0.673]
8 Colleagues of mine have had similar experiences with their favorite pieces, and I’ve long held the comforting belief that these works were just ahead of their time, that the silly reviewers didn’t get the point of our path-breaking research. [sent-8, score-0.38]
9 But then I thought, maybe the causal arrow goes in the other direction (as we say in the social sciences). [sent-9, score-0.174]
10 Those endless annoying edits we need to make in response to those stupid referees . [sent-10, score-0.552]
11 what if these edits actually make our articles better, clearer, more readable, even stronger in the substance? [sent-13, score-0.313]
12 (I know it did in my 2006 paper: somewhere in the revision process I added a whole new section that made the research much more general and interesting. [sent-14, score-0.29]
13 ) Maybe if the original editors of these papers had been more reasonable, these papers would have been of lower quality and less influential. [sent-15, score-0.339]
14 The effort taken to clarify an argument in the face of skeptical reviewers can pay off in making the published article more acceptable to others. [sent-17, score-0.351]
15 The negative reviewer of our 1992 paper hated my collaborator and me personally (or so I’ve heard) and thought the paper was crap (of course), although for some reason he never got around to contributing to the ensuing discussion in the journal. [sent-20, score-0.847]
16 I suppose it’s easier to trash something anonymously than to form a cogent criticism that’s worth signing under your own name. [sent-21, score-0.438]
17 Maybe if he could have done it all over he would’ve given our original submission a rave review so as to deprive us of the opportunity to improve it in the revision! [sent-22, score-0.395]
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Introduction: Sometimes when I submit an article to a journal it is accepted right away or with minor alterations. But many of my favorite articles were rejected or had to go through an exhausting series of revisions. For example, this influential article had a very hostile referee and we had to seriously push the journal editor to accept it. This one was rejected by one or two journals before finally appearing with discussion. This paper was rejected by the American Political Science Review with no chance of revision and we had to publish it in the British Journal of Political Science, which was a bit odd given that the article was 100% about American politics. And when I submitted this instant classic (actually at the invitation of the editor), the referees found it to be trivial, and the editor did me the favor of publishing it but only by officially labeling it as a discussion of another article that appeared in the same issue. Some of my most influential papers were accepted right
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Introduction: I had a submission a couple years ago that was rejected by a journal. One of the reviewers began with the following snotty aside: In this manuscript Gelman and Shalizi (there’s no anonymity here; this thing has been floating around the web for some time) . . . Actually, we posted it on the same day we submitted it to the journal. But double-blindness allowed the reviewer to act as if we had done something wrong! And, even if it had been “floating around the web for some time,” that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps it just meant that the article had previously been rejected by a bad-attitude reviewer!
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Introduction: I received the following email from someone who’d like to remain anonymous: Lately I [the anonymous correspondent] witnessed that Bruno Frey has published two articles in two well known referreed journals on the Titanic disaster that try to explain survival rates of passenger on board. The articles were published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives and Rationality & Society . While looking up the name of the second journal where I stumbled across the article I even saw that they put the message in a third journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences United States of America . To say it in Sopranos like style – with all due respect, I know Bruno Frey from conferences, I really appreciate his take on economics as a social science and he has really published more interesting stuff that most economists ever will. But putting the same message into three journals gives me headaches for at least two reasons: 1) When building a track record and scientific rep
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Introduction: The other day we discussed that paper on ovulation and voting (you may recall that the authors reported a scattered bunch of comparisons, significance tests, and p-values, and I recommended that they would’ve done better to simply report complete summaries of their data, so that readers could see the comparisons of interest in full context), and I was thinking a bit more about why I was so bothered that it was published in Psychological Science, which I’d thought of as a serious research journal. My concern isn’t just that that the paper is bad—after all, lots of bad papers get published—but rather that it had nothing really going for it, except that it was headline bait. It was a survey done on Mechanical Turk, that’s it. No clever design, no clever questions, no care in dealing with nonresponse problems, no innovative data analysis, no nothing. The paper had nothing to offer, except that it had no obvious flaws. Psychology is a huge field full of brilliant researchers.
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