An influential academic safeguard is distorted by status bias
To those that have, more shall be given
When, in 1905, the then-unknown patent clerk Albert Einstein sent his revolutionary ideas on special relativity, the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion and a few other topics to the German journal Annalen der Physik, its editors were happy to publish them. Submissions were rare and therefore rarely rejected—unless the text was clearly bonkers.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Peer pressure”
From the September 17th 2022 edition
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