All reviews received by SciRev

Motivation: I was always promtely infromed about any progress in the revision process. The editor was extremely professional and read carefully the manuscript in each step of the revision process. One of the referee reports was very very short and not praticularly useful. However the editor had a lot of very good suggestions which greatly improved the manuscript.

Motivation: I have had papers accepted and rejected at Criminology under the current editorial team—Osgood, Gartner, and Baumer. The team is extremely efficient and professional. The review process is very quick, authors normally receive four reviews, and the reviews are generally thoughtful and knowledgeable. The editors actually read the submitted paper and reviewers’ comments, and they explain which comments are important and which comments are less important. When they have rejected one of my papers, the editors have provided 1-2 pages of comments explaining their decision.

Motivation: The reviewers, at least one of them wanted to reject the paper from the beginning, and he/she attached very much to this idea and consequently followed that. The review was filled alway: i feel that, i feel those thing - nothing objective. It seems pure competition and in that situation he/she had the right to act on this very much.

Motivation: The revision process of this paper submitted to Advanced Robotics, one amongst the dozen of journals in robotics with impact factor nowadays, was quite unique to me. As such, I hope that other authors may bear that in mind as this may be considered as an outlier on the journal's evaluation.

After having two papers accepted at the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR2011), me, as other authors who had papers accepted at the conference, were invited to submit an extended version of their works to a Special Issue on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics, in the journal of Advanced Robotics. As such, I did so.
As we know, Special Issues do not follow the exact same rules as most regular issues. Typically, external editors are invited to take care of the process and they need to do so faster than usual as there is a tight schedule to maintain. This is why I got worried when I received the following e-mail 3 months after the submission:
"Today the Editorial Committee of Advanced Robotics needs to inform you of the serious trouble we have faced. The server, we have rented, has crushed on 20 June 2012, and on 25 June 2012 we have been informed from the server company that all of the data, including uploaded files as well as the back-up data, have been lost."
In other words, my paper got lost.

Knowing about these deadlines, I tried to resubmit once again to the Special Issue. Unfortunately, despite the considerably positive feedback from the reviewers, 4 months later, the editor-in-chief decided to reject my paper since "it is not clear the proposed methods are useful in search and rescue missions". Nevertheless, the editor-in-chief invited to resubmit it, based on the almost nonexistent reviews, to the regular issue of the journal. The paper was then accepted to the regular issue, without further revisions, 4 months later, and published another 6 months later.

That being said, I do think that this was an exception and I do believe in the quality of the journal. Therefore, I do expect that this experience won't be shared by anyone else.

Motivation: Pattern Analysis and Applications (PAA) is a considerably known Springer journal with average to high quality papers. The reviews were, in general, scientifically constructive and helped to slightly improve the overall paper. However, the duration of the whole process was unbearable. Between the moment I submitted the paper, until it was finally accepted, 1 year and a half had passed. As if this wasn't enough, although the paper became with the "in press" status after some few months (+ 2 months), it was only published in the corresponding volume and issue 1 year and 1 month after. In other words, the paper was written and submitted in 2010, but it will be cited it as being from 2013.
To keep it short, if time isn't an issue, than I recommend submitting papers to PAA. Else, if time is of the essence, as it is for me, then just search for an alternative.

Motivation: The reviews were fair. One advised major revision, the other advised rejection. My main discontent with this process was its duration; it took 10 months for two reviews of about a page and a half.

Motivation: Very quick review times, and good reviews, too. Editor seemed to rely fully on the reviewers.

Motivation: I was pleased with the handling of my manuscript by this journal.

Motivation: We received a totally biased report. When we pointed this out to the editor, he made it clear that he was not interested in objectivity either.

Motivation: My main problems were:
- extreme slowness,
- poor content of a single review after 8 months,
- I had a hard time understanding the text of the review (since a misspelled Spanish word remained in the text, I assume it was translated from Spanish by a translator program).

Motivation: Although the ms was rejected, the reviewers were fair and prompt in their responses. They offered a great deal of useful feedback which helped us revise and create a much better manuscript, which was accepted at the next journal we submitted to.

Motivation: One reviewer was exceedingly dismissive and elitist in their commentary. The ms was largely criticized for its brevity. It was specifically made brief to fit into the 'Report' format that Ecology is advertising. In the end, I think they were right to reject it. I have no hard feelings. But it was a long process and the reviews were so dismissive it should have been short.

Motivation: Great job by the handling editor. A bit slow during the first round but incredible fast during the second round. The handling editor also improved the text a lot.

Motivation: The reviewer match could have been better, but the editorial process went very smooth