All reviews received by SciRev

Motivation: The journal failed to find reviewers over 34 weeks. However, the submission site said that it was undergoing peer review, throughout this time.

Motivation: It is truly unacceptable that a decision on the manuscript took over a year. I had already followed up six months into the process, highlighting the delay, yet no meaningful action was taken to address the situation. Such treatment of authors is both disrespectful and highly unprofessional.

If a paper does not correspond to the scope or focus of the journal, it should not take more than a year to communicate this decision to the authors. The extended delay and lack of communication undermine the trust that authors should place in this journal.

Motivation: This journal requires strict initial quality check such as ethical approvals and informed consent.
The editorial staff are responsive and email replies are prompt.

Motivation: I found the process of publishing my paper to be both enriching and professionally rewarding. The peer review process was thorough and constructive, providing valuable feedback that strengthened my work. The editorial team was responsive and supportive, ensuring a smooth journey from submission to publication. Overall, I appreciated the opportunity to contribute to our field and connect with fellow researchers through this platform.

Motivation: The review process was timely and the reviewers' comments were thorough and significantly contributed to improving the manuscript. We are very happy with how the manuscript was handled by the journal's editor and impressed with the quality of the reviews.

Motivation: The initial set of reviewer's comments included only two of the three sets of comments - no one had noticed the comments from one reviewer were missing. We had to chase these. The comments from the third reviewer were so vague and poorly communicated (language and content) we struggled to understand them and raised a concern about these. We received quite rude comments from the editor on why she thought the reviewer was correct to reject the paper. We responded to all three sets of comments and the editor's but requested reviewer 3 was not consulted in the second round of reviews because of the poor quality of their comments. This was ignored. We received further feedback from all three reviewers and then the paper was rejected. Interestingly the second round of comments were clear enough to understand the editor(s) obviously felt that the quality of the initial peer review which was unintelligible was sufficient for the journal which concerned us. It is probably worth saying we did publish there previously - several years ago and the experience was more positive in terms of quality of comments so this may not be typical.

Motivation: Here is one of the two reviews I received (the other one was constructive): "As far as I can tell, the author is proposing that a linear thermodynamic theory based on Onsager's seminal work may be more widely applicable than most scientist would think. Unfortunately, the author seems to have slightly incorrect understanding of what various terms and phrases mean, and hence by the third or fourth paragraph the paper devolves to an incoherent jumble of phrases that at least to me have little relation to one another. The author uses, e.g., the term linearity, without explaining what is assumed to linearly depend on what. Nowhere is the term Onsager reciprocity, as used in this paper, defined with any precision. The bottom line is that I can not identify any specific contribution of this paper." The editor accepted this review and decided to reject the paper on its basis.

Motivation: Reviewer's feedback is very general, some even not correct. Almost cannot improve the paper from comments. However, the most frustrating issue is the total handling time.

Motivation: The two reviews comprised of one extensive report (and very useful in helping improve the manuscript further) and one paragraph of bullet points that were barely legible. The editor sided with the latter and recommended transfer to JoH-Regional Studies. The assistant editor's summary did not line up with what was written in the reviews, to the point that their two sentences seem boilerplate.

Motivation: 8 months of review time after which I finally received the review. The review itself was very positive yet the article was rejected without any reason given. A journal to which I will never submit an article again...

Motivation: Reviewer 2 found the paper interesting! Unfortunately, since the journal uses a double-blind review process, I couldn’t reference my previous paper which the current one was based on, which may have led Reviewer 2 to decide not to continue with the review 😉. The second review consisted of two pages of comments (I suspect it was assigned to a student for a course related to scientific reviews). I appreciate the time they spent on it. Some of the comments were useful, but many were very subjective. The reviewer seemed focused on providing as many comments as possible, often suggesting what they would have done if they had written the paper instead of evaluating the content of the paper itself. In some cases, I believe the reviewer misunderstood the approach and based their judgment on this misunderstanding. Although I had responses for many of the subjective comments, it was ultimately rejected, so I didn’t have time to address them. Honestly, I am not happy with the review process, especially considering the time it took—two months for the initial decision, despite my two follow-up emails urging them to speed up the process. It was rejected in the end, and given the feedback I received, I am left feeling frustrated. I think the journal has a very top-down approach and doesn’t seem to appreciate the effort we put into our papers or the time constraints, which are particularly important for a PhD student. Before submitting to this journal, I hope you will review our feedback.

Motivation: The reviewers highlighted important problems in the modeling, which we worked on and improved for our next submission.

Motivation: At first, it looked like the editor preferred our manuscript for publishing in a special issue due to its relevant topic. We waited for 2.5 months, but then the manuscript was rejected because the reviewers didn't like it. It was a hard time for us because we had been waiting for so long with so much hope.

Motivation: One reviewer suggested minor revision without much advice. Another reviewer didn't have any constructive suggestions either but just stated that he/she didn't agree with the data, without giving a solid reason. Actually this reviewer misunderstood the data and the analysis, and some put some statements in an obviously wrong way. Unfortunately, the editor lacked the expertise to assess those reviewer comments and simply rejected the paper.

Motivation: The review process for our paper has been deeply disappointing and unfair. Here's a summary of what transpired:

First Review Round:

Our paper was reviewed by three reviewers. Two of them provided constructive, well-reasoned, and positive feedback, which we addressed by implementing the recommended changes.
The third reviewer, however, provided harsh and puzzling feedback, questioning the mathematical foundations of our work and criticizing the lack of derivations for certain equations. These equations, however, were standard equations in our field, properly cited, and not novel contributions from our paper. This strongly suggests that the reviewer lacked expertise in the subject area of our paper.
Second Review Round:

Unfortunately, the two constructive reviewers did not review our revised paper, depriving us of the opportunity to receive their assessment of the changes they requested. Instead, three new reviewers were assigned:

Reviewer #R9 provided only minor comments regarding formatting but requested we cite a paper unrelated to our work.
Another reviewer requested numerous modifications, which we implemented over two weeks.
Reviewer #R11, astonishingly, provided comments that clearly referenced a completely different paper.
In our resubmission letter, we explicitly raised concerns about Reviewer #R11’s mismatch and requested their removal due to their evident error in assessing a different article.

Final Decision (After 6 Months):

The editor rejected the paper, basing the decision on Reviewer #R11’s comments, which again pertained to a different paper. It is clear the editor either did not read or disregarded our request to exclude Reviewer #R11 from the process.
Reviewer #R9 returned the paper for yet another revision due to supposed minor formatting issues and repeated their demand to cite the same unrelated paper. This raises significant ethical concerns, as it appears Reviewer #R9 was using the review process to promote their own work.

This process has been deeply disheartening. Months of work have been dismissed due to a flawed and mismanaged review process. It is especially disappointing to encounter such negligence and unprofessionalism in a reputed journal from a prestigious publisher.