I’m noticing that the more information you put into a paper, the more the reviewers demand (example: add an ROC curve to your new results in addition to class accuracies and suddenly they ask why you didn’t compute one for the old results that you’re citing as well!) This is probably why papers also tend to get needlessly long, which was the subject of another post some months back. Sort of stupid, but that’s what you get for getting people started on your ideas. The ironic thing is that the more a paper gets people to think about similar issues, the more successful it probably is – and yet because of this phenomenon, the less likely it is to be accepted!

If this hypothesis is correct, it would not only indicate that peer review causes rejection of perfectly good papers spontaneously, but that it actively seeks good papers to reject.