Content is not King, it's a poor relation

What happens when one of the worlds finest musicians goes incognito in a busy subway in Washington's business district? What happens when a musician who can command $1,000 per minute, takes his priceless Stradivari, dons a baseball cap and plays masterfully for people who would think nothing of paying $150 a ticket to see him perform.

Watch the secretly recorded video and see for yourself.

You're probably thinking that it was a busy metro station and the travellers were under pressure to get to work and therefore paid little attention to the music. Perhaps that's true. Read on and you might find yourself thinking again

Consider for a moment, the process that Scientists go though to have their papers published in their relevant journals. Typically a paper is submitted to an panel of scientists who are chosen because of their expertise in a specific field. The editor of the Scientific Journal then decides whether or not to publish based on the recommendations of the panel.

In 1982 two psychologists had a suspicion about how papers were chosen. So they selected from each of twelve well-known psychology journals an article that had already been published by them. Furthermore, each of the chosen articles had been penned by psychologists from one of ten of the most prestigious psychology departments in the US (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc.).

Here's comes the interesting bit. They changed the names of the authors to entirely fictitious ones. Furthermore they changed they changed the affiliation of these fictitious authors to lesser know Universities.

After combing through the articles to alter any references to the original author or their affiliated University, they retyped the papers and submitted them for publication in the exact same twelve journals that had originally published them!

Of the twelve journals, only three spotted that they had previously published the article. Of the remaining nine publications, eight rejected the articles (88%). Furthermore, of the panel members (sixteen experts and eight editors) who examined the (re)submissions every single one stated that the paper they reviewed did not merit publication.

It suggests that in deciding whether or not an article deserves to be published or not, the decision makers pay more attention to the author and to the standing of the institution to which they belong than they do to the content.

Content is not King, it's a poor relation.

It is true. The emperor really has no clothes.