Latest review
First review round: 20.4 weeks. Overall rating: 0 (very bad).
Outcome: Rejected.
Motivation:
Two months after submitting the manuscript, the editor sent it to my own thesis director for evaluation. This mean that they did not even check that the potential reviewer and the author belong to the same department of the same institution. When my advisor notified me about the situation I have contacted the journal stating that it is ethically wrong to send a manuscript to someone from the same institution for evaluation. They did not even apologize and simply said that they have too much work, which is very disrespectful because all of us have too much work.
I do not know who evaluated the article afterwards because it seems like they send the manuscript to anybody without even checking their institution. The reports were really bad since their main argument for rejection was that they were 'not convinced' by my argument. Nothing serious about methodology, theoretical sources, the analysis, or the literature review. They were just not convinced. The editor also argued that the manuscript did not fit with the Journal’s aims and scope, in this case I do not understand why this was not a desk reject and I had to wait for more than 5 months for useless reviewer reports. This experience makes me think that the editorial office of this journal is not respectful to authors, and they are not careful about how they treat early-career researchers.
