The pain of rejection is one that every scientist has felt: but what happens to papers after they're declined by a journal? In a new study, researchers Earnshaw et al. traced the fate of almost 1,000 manuscripts which had been submitted to and rejected by ear, nose and throat journal
To find out if the rejected papers had eventually appeared elsewhere, Earnshaw et al. searched PubMed and Google Scholar for published papers with titles and author lists matching those of the rejected manuscripts. The results showed that by November 2015, about half of the papers had eventually been published, but on average it took over a year for this to happen:
917 manuscripts were rejected over this time period... 511 manuscripts went on to be subsequently published, representing 55.7% of the initially rejected manuscripts. The average delay was 15.1 months (standard deviation, SD: 8.8 ...
