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A comment on Scientific Papers That Were Rejected Before Going on to Win a Nobel Prize (2016). Parent comment

Re:Scientific Papers That Were Rejected Before Going on to W... by dekhn on Thursday October 10, 2019 @10:28AM (#21214878)
reviewers don't exist to detect groundbreaking work (we live in an area where every scientist touts their paper as groundbreaking... beacuse they wouldn't get published otherwise).

reviewers exist to find the dumb, obvious errors in papers that should prevent publication so as to not waste too much of other's people's time.

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Re:Scientific Papers That Were Rejected Before Going on to W... by JoeAltmaier on Thursday October 10, 2019 @10:31AM (#21214917)
A neat synopsis of why the system is broken. Thanks!
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Re:Scientific Papers That Were Rejected Before Going on to W... by UncleMeat on Thursday October 10, 2019 @11:22AM (#21215526)
Science doesn't end after publication. Discussion and citation lead to further analysis of a work, allowing people to identify and understand truly groundbreaking ideas.

Peer review is only broken if you expect it to be something it isnt.

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Re:Scientific Papers That Were Rejected Before Going on to W... by dekhn on Thursday October 10, 2019 @10:59AM (#21215232)
no I think that's a sign it's working it's not like anyone in the field has an ability to predict what's truly groundbreaking groundbreaking is something that you realize 5 years later in the context of many other things that have gone on. for example I doubt that the first reviewers of the crisper papers really appreciated the deep power of the technique.
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