Comment Matches my experience (Score 2) 139
I frequently had papers rejected as "not new" without citation and then accepted elsewhere where they told me on request that they checked carefully and found the content was indeed new and interesting. My take is that this may also quite often be "reviewers" that are envious or trying to compete by putting others down, not only ones that are incompetent. Fortunately, I had nothing stolen by reviewers (after they rejected it) but I know people that had this happen to them. As the peer-review system is set up at this time, the best and the brightest need longer to get their things published, need much longer to get PhDs and have significantly lower chances at an academic career as a result. Instead those that publish a lot of shallow and/or meaningless incremental research get all the professorships, while barely qualifying as scientists. The most destructive result of this is that many fields have little or no real advancement going on as new ideas are actively squashed. After all, new ideas would show how abysmally bad at science the current position-holders are. But this is not new. Cranks like Newton had research by others squashed or suppressed, because it was better than his stuff. This is also the reason most scientific discoveries take about one research-career-length to go into actual use. The thing is that the perpetrators of the status-quo have to retire before their misconceptions and mediocre approaches can be replaced. Exceptionally stupid, but all too human.
Personally, I am now in an interesting industrial job, and I still do the occasional paper as a hobby. But I would strongly advise anybody bright against trying for an academic career. Wanting to do research right reliably ensures that you will not be able to do an academic career at all. The core ingredients for a scientific career are mediocrity, absence of brilliance, hard work and a lot of political maneuvering. Oh, and you must not care about doing good science!