my paper got rejected :( sad

Really sorry to hear that Jewel. Did you get any feedback? I know it is tough but maybe give it to after Christmas and dust off the paper, make some of the changes and submit somewhere else.

It will get published, it just needs to find the right home.

it wasn't of sufficient general appeal for the journal which is fair enough because i didn't think it did either *sighs* ultimately academic politics got in the way of good science :(

Maybe this will make you feel better:

"There are several famous examples of rejected
papers. Thus Jenner's account of the first use of vaccination
against smallpox was rejected for publication
by the President of the Royal Society. Jenner
then published his findings himself as a monograph.
In this way the Royal Society was never associated
with one of the most important medical discoveries
of the 18th century even though it was made by one
of its fellows".

Their loss! Publish it somewhere better.

i dont think it can go anywhere much better :s

rejection of a paper is very common, a lot of my freinds got their papers ejected but they were able to puplish it later in other journal. so no worry. and one of my freind already start his job as assistant prof.

rejected twice! and with conflicting comments too!

That's annoying to have conflicting comments: my supervisor is a peer-reviewer and apparently most reviewers comments are very similar. It sounds like one of the reviewers either doesn't know their stuff, or doesn't want to see it published for some reason, for example if it's in competition with their work (although I've heard that this attitude is more common in peer-reviewed funding applications).

I have to disagree, juno. I have seen/had two very different responses from reviewers for a number of papers. Some journals resolve the issue by simply getting a 3rd opinion - in my experience, this has resolved the situation nicely. Flat out rejection based on one bad review and one good review is just unfair.

Yes, I suppose getting a 3rd opinion is the fairest way to settle. Still though, I don't think two reviewers should give totally different opinions: I know there is always debate over every new discovery, but in most cases reviwers are asked to check the validity of the methods and the logic of the conclusions drawn, and trained scientists should largely agree on that.

i meant conflicting comments in that one journal said to take the paper to a more specialist journo, and when we did that the specialist journo said take it to somewhere with a broader audience ...