Kausik Datta asks:
There may be someone among us who has had this happen to him or her at some point or other: You embark on a new project in uncharted territories with gusto, your goal being gathering preliminary data that would aid generation of a hypothesis. You get data, analyze trends, feel excited, write it up and send it to YFJ (your favorite journal) - and the journal rejects it, saying, variously, "the scope of the study does not suit this journal", "the data presented are too preliminary", or the devastating "the research contains no novel finding".
On another side, you want to work on a problem that you find sufficiently interesting, given, say, your observations in a smaller, restricted cohort. You are scouring through PubMed or Google Scholar for related, descriptive studies that define the problem beyond mere anecdotes. You find zilch, zippo.
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I can certainly see the problem.
If I were singlehandedly controlling all peer reviewed journals (which, of course, I'm not), I'd have a single journal or possibly a section in most journals dedicated to preliminary findings. Knowing me, I'd call it something like "New Stuff". I would make it available online.
Ideally, such a journal or section would have a disclaimer explaining that the findings enclosed are preliminary findings only; further research is encouraged.
But enough of my idle fantasies; what are you willing to do to change this situation?
the journal rejects it, saying...
"this has been done before and done better."
This rejection is a double whammy because it not only refutes your claim that your research findings present something new, but it says you're a poor scholar for not reporting or mentioning all those "better done" studies in your review of the literature.
I told the editor that I stood by my scholarship and challenge the reviewer to produce any such studies, and lacking their ability to do so, asked that the decision be reversed. However I was up against a very well connected director of an ivy-league institute that begins with the letter H. The research in question was published in another journal, and I had quite some fun for a few years of mentioning this episode in talks and seminars.
The most famous case I know of involves a paper so novel that it was rejected at 7 different journals before finding a sympathetic editor who sought "fair" reviews. But once published this paper became the textbook example. This is what happens when you call into question the prevailing status quo.