Breakthroughs from the Second Tier - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

Breakthroughs from the Second Tier - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences: "One of the most commonly voiced criticisms of traditional peer review is that it discourages truly innovative ideas, rejecting field-changing papers while publishing ideas that fall into a status quo and the “hot” fields of the day—think RNAi, etc. Another is that it is nearly impossible to immediately spot the importance of a paper—to truly evaluate a paper, one needs months, if not years, to see the impact it has on its field.

In the following pages, we present some papers that suggest these two criticisms are correct, at least in part. These studies were published in lower-profile journals (all with current impact factors of 6 or below), suggesting they should have had less of an impact. But these papers eventually accumulated at least 1,000 citations. Many were rejected from higher-tier journals. All changed their fields forever."