Rejected for literary allusions

Ton van Raan had a paper rejected for referring to “sleeping beauty.” This is a term that van Raan and others have used to describe papers that aren’t cited for a long time and then start accumulated citations years after publication.

Rejection always makes academics grumpy, and van Raan is grumpy about this, unleashing the “political correctness gone mad” trope in his defense.

I went through something similar myself. I know first hand how easy it is to get defensive about deploying a common metaphor. But after you calm down and think about it, there is often a fair point to the criticism.

I think the editor had a good criticism but a bad implementation. Sleeping Beauty is problematic. Like many fairy tales, modern North Americans tend to know only very sanitized versions of the story. But even in the “clean” version, the part everyone remembers is pretty creepy.

I think the editor was right to ask for the author to not use Sleeping Beauty as a metaphor for scientific papers. Maybe a passing comment that this is how they have been referred to in the literature would be fine.

The editor may have failed in two ways.

The first was in rejecting the paper for a bad metaphor alone. If the scientific content was correct, it would seem that “Revise and resubmit” might have been a more appropriate response. It seems churlish to chuck the paper entirely for a poor metaphor, particularly one that is, for better or worse, already used by others in the literature.

The second was not offering a positive alternative to the Sleeping Beauty reference. Maybe these papers could be “buried treasures” or something that might be less problematic. There are many ways to express ideas. And neither an editor nor an author should dig in their heels over any particular way of expressing an idea.

Both of these problems assume the account offered by van Raan is accurate. Maybe there were other reasons for rejecting the paper besides the fairy tale reference. We don’t know.

Criticism can be valuable. Criticism plus suggestions for corrections are even better.

Hat tip to Marc Abrahams.

Related posts

Wake up calls for scientific papers

External links

Dutch professor astonished: comparison with Sleeping Beauty leads to refusal of publication