I am actually quite surprised Terence Tao still gets papers rejected from math journals... but appreciate him sharing this, as hearing this from him will help newer scientists not get discouraged by a rejection.
I had the lucky opportunity to do a postdoc with one of the most famous people in my field, and I was shocked how much difference the name did make- I never had a paper rejection from top tier journals submitting with him as the corresponding author. I am fairly certain the editors would have rejected my work for not being fundamentally on an interesting enough topic to them, if not for the name. The fact that a big name is interested in something, alone can make it a "high impact subject."
I find it bewildering that it wouldn’t, actually. I would have expected one of the earliest things in the review process happening would be to black out the submitters name and university, only to be revealed after the review is closed.
Well, the editor still sees the name of the submitter, and can also push the reviewers for an easy publication by downplaying the requirements of the journal.
I interpret it as saying that at least the system hasn't just degraded into a rubber stamp (where someone like Tao can publish anything on name alone).
I think it’s that a paper submitted by one of the most famous authors in the math field is not auto approved by the journals. That even he has to go through the normal process and gets rejected at times.
Could that also be because he reviewed the papers first and made sure they were in a suitable state to publish? Or you think it really was just the name alone, and if you had published without him they would not have been accepted?
He only skimmed them- scientists at his level are more like a CEO than the stereotype of a scientist- with multiple large labs, startups, and speaking engagements every few days. He trusted me to make sure the papers were good- and they were, but his name made the difference between getting into a good journal in the field, and a top “high impact” journal that usually does not consider the topic area popular enough to accept papers on, regardless of the quality or content of the paper. At some level, high impact journals are a popularity contest- to maintain the high citation rate, they only publish from people in large popular fields, as having more peers means more citations.
I had the lucky opportunity to do a postdoc with one of the most famous people in my field, and I was shocked how much difference the name did make- I never had a paper rejection from top tier journals submitting with him as the corresponding author. I am fairly certain the editors would have rejected my work for not being fundamentally on an interesting enough topic to them, if not for the name. The fact that a big name is interested in something, alone can make it a "high impact subject."