CONSOLATION FOR THE SCIENTIST - SOMETIMES IT IS HARD TO PUBLISH PAPERS THAT ARE LATER HIGHLY-CITED

A set of 316 commentaries by authors of highly-cited papers was review ed, to identify any difficulty encountered by the authors in producing or publishing their articles. The commentaries were selected from tho se published each week in the Citation Classic(R) feature of Current C ontents. According to their commentaries, a small proportion (5.7%) of the authors of these papers had some difficulty when doing the resear ch, or when trying to publish the results. Three more highly-cited pap ers which had also encountered difficulties in getting published were identified from Citation Classic(R) commentaries: one of them was co-a uthored by a Nobel Prize winner. Three of the papers which encountered publication problems are the most cited from their respective journal s. In part, the problematic papers reported innovative methods or theo ries, or presented new interpretations of previous data. Those in the peer review system should have access to these findings, to improve th eir review of innovative work. Evaluative criteria that are too narrow can sometimes lead to the initial rejection of very important papers.