Wrong, Trivial, Not Original

The three stages of reaction to a new scientific result:

1. It's wrong

2. It's trivial

3. I did it first

I made this up myself while still a grad student, after a particularly exasperating interaction with a referee. However, I was amused recently to find that a similar quote is attributed to Szilard in this book (see list of quotations at the end; unfortunately not available in the Google Books preview I link to).

In my case, the referee 1. claimed the paper was wrong, then, after processing a detailed reply, 2. admitted the result was correct, but then claimed it was trivial (not worth publishing; lots of things are difficult to understand at first but when clearly explained suddenly become "trivial"). A second referee agreed the result was correct and nontrivial, but of course 3. demanded we cite his earlier related work 8-)