Matthew Effect — Don’t be discouraged when your writings do not get read as you want

We have prejudices whether we deny it or not. Prejudices In academia may be better explained with the “Matthew Effect” concept. Matthew effect is a concept that applies to status and wealth which can be summarized as “The rich get richer while the poor get poorer”. However, in the beginning, this concept primarily focused on inequality in how scientists recognized it for their work.

We as writers sometimes write some articles that we are sure they hit the top charts and read. However, that is not always the case. Most of the time, written articles get no to less read. This can be caused by the lack of content, writing skills, and investigation. However, there can be another cause for that. Matthew effect explains just that.

Matthew effect coined by Robert K. Merton described as [1] “As originally identified, the Matthew effect was construed in terms of enhancement of the position of already eminent scientists who are given disproportionate credit in cases of collaboration or of independent multiple discoveries.”. This generally affects the read number and credit to authors. For example, according to a study which published in the Science [2] “Just 10% of reviewers of a test paper recommended acceptance when the sole listed author was obscure — but 59% endorsed the same manuscript when it carried the name of a Nobel laureate.” This shows the disproportionate acceptance of articles when the author is a Nobel laureate. Actually, as for scientists…