The Philosophers' Cocoon

In our new “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

At what point (if any) does a revised paper count as substantially new? I’ve been working on a paper on and off since early in my PhD program (I am now several years into postdoc). When I was a grad student, I sent it out to a few good journals and got rejections with helpful feedback that convinced me the paper needed more time in the oven. Since then, I have substantially rewritten the paper 2 or 3 times from the ground up. I don’t think anybody except me and maybe somebody who held the papers up side by side would be able to tell that one is a revision of the other. The current draft uses different terminology, starting assumptions, and argues in a different way for a different thesis. The only holdover from the original draft is a 2-page section, which has itself been reworked a number of times.

With that said, I’m wondering if, at some point, it might be appropriate to send the paper to the journals that rejected the earlier draft. I haven’t done so because my understanding is that doing so is against implicit or explicit disciplinary standards. I’ve recently read, however, of people resubmitting papers when they’ve judged them to be substantially new, with an explanatory note to the editor. My instinct is to err on the side of caution and just submit to new journals, but I would be interested to hear from authors or editors who have had relevant experience.

Good question–I’ve often wondered this myself!

What do readers think?