Yes, this, exactly so: "To my knowledge, so far, no factual relationship between rejection rate in scholarly publishing and whatever one could construe as 'quality' has been offered that would stand any scrutiny." - Bill Hooker

Yet it seems like everybody claims there was a relationship like a mantra. - Björn Brembs

Well said (written). I only have a small comment regarding "journals which retract more papers than others have a worse selection process". Reiterating what many have said elsewhere, the high rejection rates at the GlamMagz also reflects their high visibility. A retraction has a high activation energy that is often not reached, even if a paper should be retracted based on its science. - Mickey Kosloff

Good candidate to look at for selection process: http://www.atmospheric-chemist... . On the order of 70% of submitted papers are accepted, yet the journal is leader in its field in terms of citations and even IF. The secret behind that: The initial submission is not hidden, as in most journals, but published as a "discussion paper", which keeps (most) authors away from submitting low-quality stuff. Most of the rest is then filtered out via the public peer review stage before the formal publication. - Daniel Mietchen

@Mickey: indeed, visibility is a factor often ignored by the people who equate citations with quality - so I chose to also ignore it in my counter-argument. Once we both agree you can't do that, we're on a way to actually agree on something :-) - Björn Brembs

@Daniel: One more excellent example against the ludicrous connection between rejection and quality! - Björn Brembs