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49Converting rejections into positive stimuliDonald B. RubinDepartment of StatisticsHarvard University, Cambridge, MA“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”– Albert EinsteinAt first glance this Einstein quotation may seem to have little to do withmy title, but those readers who know something of Einstein’s early life willrecall that these years were not full of recognized scientific successes, but hekept working on his problems. And that is certainly related to why I chosethe quote, but there is more to it. I have been fortunate to have had manyjournal publications, but less than one percent were accepted at first submission— far more were immediately rejected, followed closely by those thatwere rejected accompanied with the suggestion that it would not be wise toresubmit. However, I cannot think of an instance where this nasty treatmentof my magnificent (self-assessed) work (sometimes joint) did not lead to amarkedly improved publication, somewhere. In fact, I think that the draftsthat have been repeatedly rejected by many different journals possibly representmy best contributions! Certainly the repeated rejections, combined withmy trying to address various comments, led to better exposition and sometimesbetter problem formulation as well.So here, in an attempt to inspire younger researchers to stay the course,I’ll relay some of my stories on the topic, of course using some of my ownpublications as examples. I’ll give only a short summary of each example,hopefully just enough for the reader to get the basic idea of the work (orpossibly even read it, or as my wonderful PhD advisor, Bill Cochran, used tosay, “I’d prefer if you read it and understood it, but if not, please read it; failingthat, just cite it!”). For potential interest, I’ll insert the approximate numberof Google Scholar cites as of August 1, 2013. These counts may be of interestbecause the relationship between the number of citations and my memory ofthe paper’s ease of acceptance appears to me to be zero (excluding the EMoutlier). So young writers, if you think you have a good idea that reviewers donot appreciate, you’re not alone, and quite possibly on to a very good idea,593