Journal title
Dur. 1st rev. rnd
Tot. handling time
Imm. rejection time
Num. rev. reports
Report quality
Overall rating
Outcome
Motivation:
Editorial decisions were fast and seemed fair, reviews were of very good quality and the editor also gave useful comments on the manuscript.
Motivation:
After sending a pre-submission early on (which is required for perspective papers in the journal), we were invited to submit the full manuscript. We got a desk rejection, so we found the pre-submission step useless. The decision was very fast, so no time was wasted.
Motivation:
The reviewer just provided two sentences saying that our article would have been more appropriate for some other journal.
Motivation:
Really fast process and high-quality reviews. They do not strongly argue rejection, but this journal receives many manuscripts, and the editorial decision is reasonable. I recommend to submit here and I will do it again in the future.
Motivation:
We originally submitted to Nature Ecology and Evolution and it was desk-rejected after ~10 days with the option to transfer to Nature Communications. The original turn around time (5 weeks) was very reasonable. The reviewers requested substantial edits and the editor gave us 3-6 months to resubmit. This was also at the beginning of COVID19 so we took almost the whole time to complete the revision. Afterward, the second decision time (~7 weeks) was very reasonable considering the current state of the world. The editor gave us provisional acceptance pending addressing the reviewer's minor requests and formatting for the journal. Overall, a great experience, but I still don't think it's worth the inordinately high charges.
6.9 weeks
14.4 weeks
n/a
2 reports
Accepted
Motivation:
We made an appeal for review. Appeal got accepted and they sent the manuscript for review and rejected within a week with two reviewers reports.
We do not feel the manuscript was thoroughly assessed, rejection was due to it not being in the top 10%. It is not clear what top 10% means if work is rejected even even though it does not have a strong precedent and had potentially very broad applications. The recommendation was to transfer to Chem E J. It appears to us that the manuscript only received a cursory look (no details on why it is not in the top 10%). A response from us to the editor's decision was not followed through in a timely manner, requiring a reminder. At the time of the reminder, we decided to withdraw the manuscript and submit to another venue that has been much fairer in its handling of our manuscripts, and to avoid further delays. It is our view that good papers are shunted to other journals within a publisher to promote IFs of those journals.
We do not feel the manuscript was thoroughly assessed, rejection was due to it not being in the top 10%. It is not clear what top 10% means if work is rejected even even though it does not have a strong precedent and had potentially very broad applications. The recommendation was to transfer to Chem E J. It appears to us that the manuscript only received a cursory look (no details on why it is not in the top 10%). A response from us to the editor's decision was not followed through in a timely manner, requiring a reminder. At the time of the reminder, we decided to withdraw the manuscript and submit to another venue that has been much fairer in its handling of our manuscripts, and to avoid further delays. It is our view that good papers are shunted to other journals within a publisher to promote IFs of those journals.
Motivation:
Efficient and fast review process. The quality of the reviews this time was great. The editor handled the submission very well.
Motivation:
The editor handled the paper swiftly and the comments of reviewers were very helpful in streamlining and improving the paper.
Motivation:
The overall handling of the manuscript was very pleasing and the reviewers' comments were very constructive. The time in review could be shorter but can be seen as justified due to the selection of appropriate reviewers - anyway, it was acceptable.
Motivation:
The feedback from Ceramics International was quick. The review quality was acceptable, although it was only one reviewer.
Motivation:
Journal editors and reviewers were very efficient.
Motivation:
We only received the rejection after we set a deadline to withdraw the submission. 5 weeks for an editorial rejection is completely unacceptable and disrespectful of the authors' time. In their FAQ, the journal states: "Why should I publish in Science Advances? There are many advantages to publishing in Science Advances: Speed – Science Advances aims to rigorously and quickly review manuscript submissions and rapidly publish articles online."
This is not true, quite the opposite: Science Advances is by far the slowest journal I have ever dealt with.
This is not true, quite the opposite: Science Advances is by far the slowest journal I have ever dealt with.
Motivation:
After 8 months of not receiving any response from the journal, we contacted them and they claimed that four of the reviewers had declined to review the paper due to the COVID-19, and only one reviewer had accepted to review the paper. It is interesting that the reviewer had suggested revision(the reviewer's comments were of value, however), but the editors decided to reject the paper and suggested a transfer to another journal of a lower ranking with a very high publication fee. So, they just wasted our time with no outcome!
Motivation:
The initial decision took far longer than my previously submitted manuscripts to this journal (in the past I've experienced ~6-7 weeks) but admittedly this was also during the start of the COVID pandemic. The manuscript was sent to two reviewers, one of which offered a one-line comment saying the manuscript "This is an exceptionally well-written manuscript. It also makes a significant contribution to the field on social network research methodology." The second reviewer wrote one paragraph but did not point to any necessary changes. After these initial reviews the editor gave the manuscript an "revise & resubmit w/ minor revisions" but it was not clear what either the reviewers or editor wanted to change. Upon inquiry to the editor, I resubmitted without changes and got the paper accepted. Although it was nice to have an acceptance w/o revisions, I felt that the reviewers did not give a thorough read as I failed to believe that there was not one thing worth revising.
Motivation:
The entire process took way too long (for which they apologized). We received only one surprisingly low-quality and short review, ignoring all the main contributions of the paper, and only claiming false points. Unfortunately it was clear that the reviewer did not even read the paper -- he/she said "no" to all the structured questions like "is the paper written well", "is the procedure explained", etc. (well, it may sound ridiculous emphasizing this, but as one may guess we did explain our procedures with lengthy formal results and mathematical proofs backing it up. So, yes, he/she did not read the paper). Aside from the poor review, we got direct rejection without considering other reviews, just saying that it is unlikely to change their mind. More disappointing was that we did not have the chance to rebuttal the false claims.
Myself and my co-authors are senior researchers with several prior publications in different top venues. This paper in particular was the result of several rounds of reading and polishing as well as consideration of inputs from multiple high-caliber colleagues. It was an extremely disappointing experience.
Myself and my co-authors are senior researchers with several prior publications in different top venues. This paper in particular was the result of several rounds of reading and polishing as well as consideration of inputs from multiple high-caliber colleagues. It was an extremely disappointing experience.
Motivation:
The feedback provided by the editor to justify the rejection was quite generic and not argumented, therefore not very useful.
Motivation:
The feedback from the editor to justify the rejection was rather generic and not very useful. It would have been very useful to describe specific issues to be resolved or addressed by complementary experiments to make the manuscript potentially suitable to be sent to reviewers.
Motivation:
Most of the reviewer criticisms were irrelevant but we nevertheless addressed them to have our paper accepted. Editorial handling was smooth.
Motivation:
Not as fast as I had hoped but otherwise an excellent experience. Reviews were of high quality and the editor themelves took time to provide additional and very through feedback.
0.6 weeks
0.6 weeks
n/a
3 reports
Accepted
Motivation:
Most of the reviews were thorough, careful and helpful, but the review process was unnecessarily slow with no responses and indifference from the editor. After the acceptance, it took a while to get the paper published, mostly because the production process introduced inexplicable errors that were not in my submitted version. Overall, the process was average, and I would submit to the journal again hoping that the slow process was just an unfortunate outlier.
Motivation:
The article was in review for over three months, and returned two very thin reviews. These raised no critical issues that would sink the paper, and the editor did not give clear reasons for outright rejection.
Motivation:
Despite one positive and one negative review, the editor did not provide us with an opportunity to respond to the latter.
Motivation:
I contacted the associate editor 5 times and the editor-in-chief twice, during the review process, but I didn't get a response. The peer-review process and quality were poor and irresponsible.
Motivation:
It seems that two of the referees did not possess very deep knowledge of the main theoretical literature, and one of the reviewers admitted he/she is neither sociologist nor philosopher. Furthermore, the comment about country selection is unfair: postdoc projects work like this. To get funding, you are supposed to find an interesting comparative case, and there are some reasons for this but for the topic of the manuscript it could have been anywhere. It is just that my project got funding to study these two particular countries.
Motivation:
The review process was not extra long despite the hard times of COVID pandemic.
The collected reviews were professional. One reviewer was supportive, however the others criticized that the topic is out of the scope of the journal. It was a bit strange that the strictest reviewer meticuously criticized some very-very minor points (like usage of synonims, or the color of a line in a figure) of the manuscript.
Anyway, we agreed that a part of the discussion is a bit out of the scope of the journal, so we considered some comments of the reviewers and submit the revised version to a different journal.
The collected reviews were professional. One reviewer was supportive, however the others criticized that the topic is out of the scope of the journal. It was a bit strange that the strictest reviewer meticuously criticized some very-very minor points (like usage of synonims, or the color of a line in a figure) of the manuscript.
Anyway, we agreed that a part of the discussion is a bit out of the scope of the journal, so we considered some comments of the reviewers and submit the revised version to a different journal.
Motivation:
I received a personalized rejection letter explaining the reasons why the manuscript was not appropriate for the readership. Albeit short, it pointed out useful feedback in publication strategy.
4.4 weeks
4.4 weeks
n/a
1 reports
Rejected