Journal title
Dur. 1st rev. rnd
Tot. handling time
Imm. rejection time
Num. rev. reports
Report quality
Overall rating
Outcome
Motivation:
Journal editorial process was discourteous and unprofessional in handling my manuscript in a timely manner to promote findings towards publication. The editorship took an unreasonably long time to produce reviews and allowed a number of unsubstantiated, tangential reviews to be submitted. Also, unclear guidance was provided in terms of editing that provided little direction and contradictory instructions. Overall, a poor performance of editorship and scholarly peer review process characterized my experience at JHCPU.
Motivation:
The editorial office does not answer emails and made devastating mistakes along the way. I have probably submitted 70 manuscripts in my career, this is by far the worst experience. Ended up withdrawing the paper due to the journal's incompetence.
Motivation:
A total review time of 5.5 months seems unreasonable (our editing contributed about 1 month to this). When the first round of edits are purely editorial, one might expect that the AE would make the call at that point rather than sending the manuscript out for a second round. When the second round of reviews consists of one review with comments that were addressed in under an hour by a find-and-replace and the addition of a single line to the text such that the manuscript was resubmitted within hours of receiving the "reviews", the AE should certainly make the call at that point. When the third round of reviews consist of no comments, one might start to wonder about the purpose of the second and third rounds of review. Personally, I started wondering if our bacteria had evolved since the initial submission, and were no longer considered part of the genus.
The one positive was that the invoice arrived in my inbox days after acceptance. Incredibly efficient! Well done, PLoS One.
The one positive was that the invoice arrived in my inbox days after acceptance. Incredibly efficient! Well done, PLoS One.
Motivation:
My experience and the experiences of several other collaborators with the REVIEW process of Cell Reports is not very promising. Even though the Editorial Board seems to be motivated to handle the manuscript fast, the indicated time window on cell reports homepage is not very realistic. They need at least twice as much time for everything. At least two more colleagues stated similar experiences. You should also take into account that 2-3 rounds of revisions are not rare even though cell reports officially claims this would be unusual. At least in my case the first round of revisions was very helpful but the follwing rounds were just time consuming and not very helpful in my opinion. In summary, you may submit your manuscript to another journal.
Motivation:
The process was very long and communication was limited. Although the time to the first revision was still acceptable, and revisions were helpful and important, the time it took after that was not reasonable.
Motivation:
Our reviewers were experts in this field, and we received high-quality reports. The editorial office provided quick responses.
53.3 weeks
53.3 weeks
n/a
1 reports
Rejected
Motivation:
Our paper was transferred from Science Translational Medicine. That helped make the review process faster at Science Immunology. But still, I feel quite happy about the way this manuscript was handled at SI.
Motivation:
The editorial and review processes were handled most professionally, and the quality of the three reviews and the associate editor's comments was high. The time to the first decision, whilst rather lengthy, was appropriate given the length and complexity of the paper.
Motivation:
Initial submission was fine - took them a while until we heard back but not too bad. First round of reviews was fine too, criticisms were appropriately formulated. After revising, it took them quite a long time to give us an update which was the "fear period" it won't be accepted after all the effort (which it then did fortunately).
Motivation:
The review process was efficient and fairly quick. The editor and the reviewers provided useful comments. The editor respected that we decided not to address few of his/her requests.
Motivation:
The review process was good. The two reports from the reviewers were actually useful. The editor provided some useful feedback, and everything went on quite smoothly.
Motivation:
I was given the option to transfer my submission to ACS Omega, but declined the opportunity.
Motivation:
The turn around on this paper was very very fast.
Motivation:
The review process was fine. But the proof stage was very poorly done. They used an automated paginator and I had to make all the changes myself. The tool was not able to make some changes, requiring comments to be added that were not addressed by the publisher. They then tried to publish the article without making some of the requested changes. The changes were eventually made after much effort in contacting the publisher.
The editor and reviewers were great though.
The editor and reviewers were great though.
Motivation:
Our overall experience with this journal was relatively positive. Despite not paying for fast track publication, we received our reviews fairly quickly and the whole process was clear and structured to manage both parties' expectations. However, the reviewers' comments were not helpful and it seemed as if they did not even read the article. We were grateful for the chance to rank the reviewers and hope either their expertise lay elsewhere or they will not be used for other submitters in the future. JMIR has clearly thought about the experience of authors, and we look forward to submitting with them again in the future.
Motivation:
Very slow review process. Too long! Good careful review reports. Very extensive quality rules for BJP are tedious to comply with but make a better manuscript.
Motivation:
Only managed to find one reviewer, after all others failed to respond or declined to review.
Rejected it based on the advice of that one reviewer, despite the fact the reviewer clearly didn't understand how the methodology aligned with the aims of the research.
Much of the feedback was difficult to understand, the reviewer's English was poor and so comments made little sense. Majority of the feedback was unhelpful and suggested completely redesigning the data collection, despite the data being sourced from literature.
Would have been fine with the rejection and the feedback, but the poor communication of the reviewer made it difficult to trust their opinions. Given the poor quality of the review, I didn't expect the editor to just accept the reviewers advice so readily, perhaps the journal needs a better selection process for reviewers.
Rejected it based on the advice of that one reviewer, despite the fact the reviewer clearly didn't understand how the methodology aligned with the aims of the research.
Much of the feedback was difficult to understand, the reviewer's English was poor and so comments made little sense. Majority of the feedback was unhelpful and suggested completely redesigning the data collection, despite the data being sourced from literature.
Would have been fine with the rejection and the feedback, but the poor communication of the reviewer made it difficult to trust their opinions. Given the poor quality of the review, I didn't expect the editor to just accept the reviewers advice so readily, perhaps the journal needs a better selection process for reviewers.
Motivation:
very good smooth process along with realistic reviewers' report. The editor's and reviewers' comment helped us to improve the manuscript.
Motivation:
When I submitted the paper, the editor rejected the paper with very useful comments in 4 days. I modified the paper and resubmit it again. Then, the paper is sent for the review process. The reviewers were familiar with the topic and provided appropriate comments. In conclusion, I had a good experience.
Motivation:
The reviewers' comments helped in improving the paper. One reviewer (and the editor) offered a different way to parse the data and analyze it, making it more easy to communicate. The concerns of 2/3 of the reviewers led us to conduct a 2nd experiment which (a) replicated the results and (b) eliminated their concerns of potential alternative explanations. The theoretical contribution of the paper was also strengthened by the comments of the reviewers. Overall the process was a positive (although a bit lengthy).
Motivation:
Extremely long and frustrating processing time. The article went through several rounds of revision and would get kicked back by quality check for different things that weren't identified in previous rounds, each time taking a week to go through another quality check. It took over a month to find an editor for the article and one was identified only after I reached out to the journal to figure out why the manuscript hadn't moved and suggested more potential editors. The length of the review stage was on par with other journals, but the manuscript sat in Decision Started status for over a month. I got no response to my inquiries during this time. It took ~5 months to get the first review back, which is significantly longer than any other journal that I've used. On a positive note, the reviewer comments were thorough and did improve the manuscript. Subsequent review rounds did not take as long individually, but the manuscript spent over 8 months under review (not including time spent working on revisions).