If a paper is rejected by many journals before finally being published, will that cause conflict with the reviewers who rejected the manuscript?

Question

I had a manuscript written 3 years before. The results of the manuscript was obtained accidentally while doing some easy trial methods. Although the results were very interesting, but the method was very very simple. So I thought to publish it in a low impact journal to increase my number of publications. But things went very opposite and got rejected in 5 journals. Everyone were commenting that the method is very simple and may introduce the unknown errors to the estimations or computations.

As no one was commenting other than the methods, so I had no way to modify anything. Very bad thing is that none of the journal took less than 4-6 months to take the first decision and my manuscript remained unaccepted for two years and half.

Finally I thought to submit it to a high impact journal. Very surprisingly, the reviewers appreciated the simple method used and accepted the manuscript with a major revision to highlight few other things.

My accepted manuscript highlights the same methodology which was rejected by 5 other journals.

Will there be any conflict or issues when those reviewers (who rejected my manuscript) see my accepted paper after final publication?

Answer 1

Your referees at specialist journals said, basically, "These methods aren't good enough to answer these questions, because X." But the generalist high-impact journal may have looked more at the results than the methods.

If X is "we just don't think this is very sophisticated, and the tools are out of fashion," I suspect nothing will happen.

If X is "there are uncontrolled errors larger than your effect," and you haven't explained in your paper why that isn't true, someone might write a comment on your paper. This comment will look a lot like your earlier referee reports. The field will then decide who is right. (See, e.g. the "arsenic life" experiment for a recent high-profile example.)

Beyond this, if I saw the second case from a paper I refereed, and there was no attempt from the authors to address the points I raised, I would not be happy with the authors, and might be less likely to extend them the benefit of the doubt in future referee reports.