Latest review
First review round: 25.3 weeks. Overall rating: 0 (very bad).
Outcome: Accepted.
Motivation:
I found the average time to decision listed on the website to be entirely misleading. While I'm thrilled that my paper was accepted, I wouldn't recommend the process to anyone. I initially submitted my paper in October 2024 and received reviews and an initial decision to reject in January 2025. This decision got overturned b/c one of the reviewers did not review the correct manuscript. As required by the journal, I had uploaded an unpublished paper that was cited in my manuscript as supplementary material for the reviewers. One of the reviewers mistakenly reviewed only that paper instead of my actual submission. I was pleasantly surprised that the editor apologized when I pointed this out and offered to have it reviewed correctly, however, I was really displeased with the lack of clarity about the timeline. I explicitly stated that I was only interested in completing the review process if I could get reviews back within a month, and even though I asked several times to confirm the expected timeline, I never got a straight answer. They requested major revisions after a few months (April) and once I submitted those (June), they were unable to find the original reviewers and insisted on waiting to find an additional new reviewer.
Throughout this process, whenever the portal was updated to indicate that reviews were received, I had to send multiple follow-up emails over the course of a month or more to ask about when I could expect a decision. The responses I received often stated that they would remind the editor that the reviews were in, and that I would get a response "soon". "Soon" typically meant several weeks.
I would not submit a manuscript to this journal again. The communication regarding the manuscript handling was poor, and the process took far too long.
