Do editors pay attention to past rejections?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

Maybe this calls for speculation, but I wonder if other readers have their own sense of whether journal reviews are truly blind. In particular, I am curious if others have the sense that, after they have been rejected at a journal a particular number of times, over a particular span of years, their new submissions receive less consideration than others.

I certainly hope this isn't the case! And, being a quasi-Bayesian, I'd understand if it were. I just find myself thinking, with respect to certain journals, that my rejection pile is so substantive that (maybe?) they are inclined to reject an article of mine based on past evidence.

This is an interesting query, and I'm curious to hear from authors and editors! Here are couple of quick thoughts...

Some journals are only double-anonymized, which means that editors are aware of an author's identity. How exactly this figures into the peer-review process is something that I'm not well-placed to comment on. However, it at least opens up the possibility that an author's identity or past rejections might play a role. But second, in my own case, I haven't noticed any clear negative effects from past rejections. I've published in some good journals over the past several years that I had multiple rejections from previously, as well as some revise-and-resubmits from other journals. So, although this is at best only anecdotal, it seems like multiple rejections in the past haven't caused my work to receive less consideration.

But this is just my experience. What's yours?

Comments

[Michel]

I don't think so, but there are some journals (/book series which function as journals) in subfields I don't dabble in about whom I might have some questions, based on floating allegations about editorial behaviour in the past (or, indeed, their submission policies).

That said, I do wonder about referee selection more broadly and the extent to which editors may try to match submissions from fancypants bigwigs to reliable referees or known quantities. That could certainly skew things, although I imagine that referees accept requests at a low enough rate that it mostly comes out as a wash.