How do you explain to a young colleague that his paper was rejected because the reviewer thinks that “… it sounds rare to have so few people doing any work in that direction…”.
So, dear reviewer, if I understood you correctly, you are recommending us to keep reinventing the wheel again and again?
Now that you have enlightened me, I’ve come to the conclusion that my next paper will be “A UML profile to represent navigation in Web applications”. I think this topic has been explored long enough to be on the safe side. I’m not sure I can add anything new but I guess this is not so important (and anyway I’m quite confident I’ll be able to hide the lack of contribution behind well-prepared sentences written to fool you, I’m sure you’ll be impressed by the huge amount of papers on the topic that you’ll not pay much attention to the actual content).
You should pass the young colleague a copy of Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. OTOH it might indeed be a dead-end, in which case the advice is good!
Love the idea of giving him Thomas paper!! Regarding the dead-end part, sure it can be a dead-end but the justification shouldn´t be that others are not following this path…