I’ve occasionally made the mistake of submitting heretical articles to the journals of well-known ‘learned’ societies. On one occasion, a theoretical article was rejected on the basis that I should have written an excavation report. On another – though the feedback was less than transparent – I got the impression that the editor and peer reviewers simply disagreed with the argument.
How common is this? Many years ago, someone did a study of submissions to the top medical journal, The Lancet. It was discovered that, while routine papers usually got published, seminal/path-breaking papers were just as likely to be rejected as obviously bad papers.
I’m not remotely surprised by this. A paper is not necessarily of value because it is heretical, of course; it may just be wrong. But who is to judge this?
