Interesting concept for a journal
Spotted at Downtown Books & News, Asheville, NC – The Rejected Quarterly, fine literature rejected at least five times. Interesting idea that may or may not play out in the sciences. Still, you gotta love the moxie.
I guess the proof is in the pudding: I didn’t actually buy it. Went with Creative Nonfiction, #42, instead.
Matt Thompson is adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Old Dominion University. He was once cast as a soldier in Andrew Jackson's army in a theatrical production on an Indian reservation.
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They are indeed connoisseurs of the underappreciated at that particular establishment.
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From a scientific perspective, five rejections will almost always indicate a bad paper. But what about a list of papers that were initially rejected, but subsequently published? That would be interesting. Path-breaking work is often rejected once or twice. Mark Granovetter’s paper on the strength of weak ties was initially rejected with an incredibly scathing lengthy review by a top sociology journal. It was later published, to become one of the most influential and widely-cited papers in the social sciences. A couple of my more innovative papers were rejected by at least one journal before finding a home. Reviewers for Current Anthropology, for example, were quite traditional and had no idea what I was trying to accomplish (in a paper about the modern relevance of ancient cities). A British archaeology journal figured it out, however. Now, thinking of Granovetter, I am just waiting for the zillions of citations that are bound to come……………..
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There’s a similar journal publishing math papers: http://math.rejecta.org/
From the Web site:
“At Rejecta Mathematica we believe that many previously rejected papers (even those rejected for legitimate reasons) can nonetheless have a very real value to the academic community. This value may take many forms:
“mapping the blind alleys of science”: papers containing negative results can warn others against futile directions;
“reinventing the wheel”: papers accidentally rederiving a known result may contain new insight or ideas;
“squaring the circle”: papers discovered to contain a serious technical flaw may nevertheless contain information or ideas of interest;
“applications of cold fusion”: papers based on a controversial premise may contain ideas applicable in more traditional settings;
“misunderstood genius”: other papers may simply have no natural home among existing journals.”
Good points, I think. Perhaps we could use something similar in anthropology?
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Erica, brilliant. Useful, too.
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