Latest review
First review round: 11.4 weeks. Overall rating: 2 (moderate).
Outcome: Rejected.
Motivation:
The main complaints for this submission is the speed of decision making relative to the end result, i.e. the number and quality of the reviews. While the final decision took only a bit longer than the then reported average in the journal (about 60 days at the time of submission), the fact that the result was only one review with feedback that implying only a shallow and quick reading of the manuscript was a disappointment.
While never communicated in such a way by the editor, there seemed to be trouble finding external reviewers as implicated by the status of the manuscript in the Editorial Manager system, which changed between "under review" and "appointing reviewers" several times during the process.
While the reviewer comments demonstrated bad reading of the manuscript (commenting on things that were quite thoroughly described within the text) and in the end had nothing critical to say about the methods or the results themselves, some of the points they made about textual clarity were on point. With changes made based on these comments, the manuscript was later accepted and published in a same caliber specialist journal with minor revisions, so even if frustrating, the revision process was not totally in vain.
