All reviews received by SciRev

Motivation: One reviewer report; no other reviewers found by the journal. The one reviewer's comments were five sentences. The first three sentences indicate that the reviewer did not read the manuscript. The methods that are "not described" are in fact described, some of them in the supplementary material. The last sentence then states that this information that was "not described" should be in the main manuscript instead of the supplementary material. Based on this, the editor rejected the paper.

Motivation: A well-executed paper review benefits authors, even if the reviewed paper is ultimately rejected. Authors can use the feedback to improve their work and submit it to other journals. In my experience, a single reviewer mostly focused on grammatical and compositional flaws rather than methodological or theoretical problems in the article.

Motivation: After addressing all reviewer comments, the editor requested changes that required re-experimentation. The manuscript failed to address one of the editor's comments, leading the editor to recommend rejection that took almost an year.

Motivation: Rapid ediorial rejection

Motivation: The editor-in-chief refused to consider our manuscript with the wording “Journal does not accept such review papers” without any justification

Motivation: We were offered a transfer to another journal. I'm glad that the desk rejection was quick - within 2 days.
There is a reference limit of 30 for (most?) Lancet journals, which I personally find very questionable.

Motivation: It took the journal almost 8 weeks to make the decision of desk rejection.

Motivation: The desk reject took quite long. They did not offer any internal Lancet transfers, but referred me to several other Elsevier journals. These had impact factors ranging from approx 1.5 - 20, which seems a rather broad range.

Motivation: One month for a desk rejection ("out of scope") is too long.

Motivation: The reviewers definitively were experts on the field. Their report were very deep and helpful. My overall experience was extremely positive.

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.