Latest review
First review round: 27.9 weeks. Overall rating: 2 (moderate).
Outcome: Accepted.
Motivation:
My experience with JMIR Aging was mixed. One reviewer provided thoughtful, constructive feedback that genuinely improved the paper. The other repeatedly returned with what felt like generic, repetitive comments that showed little understanding of scoping review methodology and often asked for things that were impossible to provide given the available evidence. We ended up resubmitting three times in response to essentially the same questions, despite giving detailed replies at each stage. Several of the comments were so formulaic and disconnected from both the manuscript and our responses that we strongly suspected they may have been AI-generated. Frustratingly, this should have been identified much earlier through editorial oversight, and it cost me a considerable amount of unnecessary time and effort. However, once I contacted the editor directly to explain our concerns, the response was very professional. The review history was reassessed and the manuscript was accepted almost immediately. The post-acceptance process was much more positive, although publication still took around three months due to extensive copy-editing, production queries and slow turnaround times. Overall, I was happy with the final outcome, but a stronger editorial intervention earlier in the process would have saved months of unnecessary revisions. I have avoided resubmitting to this journal due to my concerns with AI-generated reviews, but I do have colleagues who say they’ve had more positive experiences so maybe we just had bad luck.
