Rejection improves impact?

Research papers, rejected first-time elsewhere, when eventually get published, get cited more than others in that journal.

According to the recent Nature report by Philip Ball, based on the submission histories of 80,748 scientific articles published among 923 bioscience journals between 2006 and 2008 and related information provided by the papers’ authors (via emails), Vincent Calcagno, an ecologist at the French Institute for Agricultural Research in Sophia-Antipolis, and his colleagues

[...] found that 3–6 years after publication, papers published on their second try are more highly cited on average than first-time papers in the same journal — regardless of whether the resubmissions moved to journals with higher or lower impact.

Related article: Calcagno, V. et al. Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1227833 (2012).

To paraphrase Calvin's father, Rejection builds character!

From my limited rejection experience in engineering research, I haven't observed this 'citation trend' for my publications. But then, I may be way out of field and league.

(read the Nature report for contrasting observations from another study).