Publish or perish - part 4, Politics and publishing

I figured I would continue this blog series with another example of how politics and research often intersect. When I was in graduate school, I attended a local conference for my field in which one of the keynote speakers was a very well-known researcher. He is an elderly gentleman and was reflecting on his personal career during the speech since he had won a lifetime achievement award. One of the topics he discussed was the numerous times where his papers were rejected based on personal politics and not based on the scientific merits of the study. When I say personal politics, I am not referring to whether you are a Republican or a Democrat. Rather, I am referring to the positions one takes on certain issues. For example, there are some people who believe that fibromyalgia is a legitimate diagnosis and others who believe it is really more of a psychiatric problem.

Let's say you did a research study that showed there was a link between a particular blood test finding and fibromyalgia. Well, this would now run counter to the beliefs of those who believe this is impossible and if the paper was sent to one of these people for review, that reviewer may go out of his/her way to poke holes in the study so as to provide grounds to reject it. This is even more likely if the study is going to show findings opposite of something the reviewer has published in the past. Now, just because the paper is rejected from one journal does not mean it won't be accepted somewhere else. It just delays the process significantly because the reviews take months and sometimes up to a year, depending on the journal and the backlog.

There is a saying in research that if you send your study to enough journals, eventually you'll find someone who will publish it. That is probably an exaggeration, but there are now so many journals for every field of science these days that papers of lower quality are more likely to get accepted. Click here for the next post.