Juan Miguel Campanario, Erika Acedo "Rejecting highly cited papers: The views of scientists who encounter resistance to their discoveries from other scientists" Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58, 5, 734-743.

[Karen Medina]

Dear Sigmetrics community,

I just recently read Campanario's 1993 paper "Consolation for the Scientist: Sometimes It is Hard to Publish Papers That are Later Highly-Cited"* and hadn't had the time to go look for his follow-up work, so I was glad to see this posted.

What intrigues me is setting this paper along side Hermanowicz's claim that rejection is commonplace and that persistence is the most valuable characteristic for success**.

So maybe Campanario's original hypothesis that originality is not valued may not be the whole answer. If rejection is as commonplace as Hermanowicz alludes to, perhaps all work (regardless of originality) just needs to be pushed again and again. I like one of the quotes from Hermanowicz's interview subjects: "You have to be creative. You have to have good ideas and pursue them. You have to certainly be smart enough to get the ideas, tenacious enough to keep pushing, and confident enough to know that you're on the right track, and also to switch when you've made a mistake. (Interview 43)" (p. 143).

Footnotes
*Campanario, J. M. (1993). Consolation for the Scientist: Sometimes It is Hard to Publish Papers That Are Later Highly-Cited. Social Studies of Science, 23(2), 342-362. (May, 1993)

** Hermanowicz, J. C. (2006). What Does It Take to Be Successful? Science, Technology, & Human Values, 31(2), 135-152. http://sth.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/2/135

--- Original Message said: -------
>AUTHOR  :   Juan Miguel Campanario, Erika Acedo (2007)
>TITLE   :   Rejecting highly cited papers: The views of scientists who encounter resistance to their discoveries from other scientists
>
>SOURCE  : Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,  58, 5, 734-743.
>The full text of this  paper is available in English at :
>http://www2.uah.es/jmc/ai53.pdf