All reviews received by SciRev

Motivation: extraordinarily quick decision compared to other journal, or indeed this journal under previuos editors

Motivation: This is the 4th paper that i have submitted (and had 3 accepted) by the BJGP.

As always, the process was rigorous, but fair. Because of the complex statistics in this paper, it was sent out to a 3rd reviewer, a statistician. The comments from all 3 reviewers were very constructive. I made considerable efforts to address these fully, and the end result was a much improved paper. The editor was extremely supportive throughout, dealing promptly and helpfully with a query whilst I was preparing the revised manuscript.

The journal's website with guidance for authors is detailed and clear.

The quality of the submission process for this journal is outstanding, compared to other journals I have used. I would commend the BJGP to authors with suitable manuscripts.

Motivation: Very good journal and an excellent editor. He knows the value of time and doesn't delay any process at all.

Motivation: My main problem was the slowness of the process. The time to get editorial feedback back on our proposed scheme for a revision, and then the proposed scheme for the rebuttal and second small revisions, delayed things.
Also there was one reviewer who was quite unreasonable and asked for a lot of new experiments on the revised manuscript. The editor overrode them in the end, and focused on the one relevant issue they brought up, which I was grateful for.

Motivation: Knowledgeable reviewers (clearly experts in the area) provided constructive feedback. The review process was quick and efficient. The MS was handled very well by the editor.

Motivation: Overall: not enough editorial filtering.
One of the reviewers flagged a statistical query, which is what got a statistical reviewer involved. The first review was easy enough to address, requiring clarifications and some additional statistical analyses to rule out confounding (which we were able to do). The second, third and fourth rounds were only with the statistical reviewer as the others were satisfied with the first response. I understand that statistical reviewers are important in population-level studies, but there has to be some editorial sense-checking of the comments coming in. They cannot allow comments that contradict previous suggestions and just leave the authors to go back and forth catering to every whim and fancy. We had to deal with one comment that was so bizarre, that it required us to produce a two-page long table that added nothing to the material presented in the manuscript, and is unlike anything published in the field.
However, another issue is the copy-editing and house style of the journal. There are way too many deviations from SI systems, and these all become the author's problem to incorporate. It is especially challenging for graphing, where restrictions by colour palette, and the unique method of writing units mean that every graph required special formatting syntax. Additionally, we had so many conflicting comments from the copy editors in subsequent reviews: change LDL Cholesterol to LDL-cholesterol and then change LDL-cholesterol to LDLc.
A journal need only bother with formatting figures down to colour schemes etc once they have accepted a manuscript, so long as the figures are legible and clear. Starting from the first revision to the third we were saddled with minor formatting requests, that could easily have all been pooled at the end. It would also be helpful if journals in general gave dpi requirements for grayscale and coloured images instead of simply saying what is sent across was inadequate.

Motivation: Very efficient.

Motivation: Reviewers had generic criticism about the fact that other authors (they name them, but they do not point to specific papers) already addressed the same problem. Not pointing out any specific paper is very annoying because of course authors are convinced that there are differences w.r.t. literature work. Just saying that other authors worked in the same area or the same problem without the possibility to verify it is not enough. Other criticism was ok in the sense that they required further experiments and practical validation. However, saying that what is proposed cannot be implemented in practice in a straightforward way is again generic without pointing out any specific concern about the transferrability of the result in the real world.

Motivation: The review process was relatively quick, though it would have been beneficial to receive more extended feedback/review as some journals are wont to do. I was only informed of the acceptance, which was pleasant but the article might have profited from more concrete scrutiny. As well, as far as I know there's little by way of copy-editing provided.

Motivation: Our manuscript was initially rejected after the first round of reviews. It seemed to us the decision was largely based on the a methodological misunderstanding from only one reviewer. We appealed the decision and were granted an appeal on the condition of providing significant additional data (including totally new approaches not used in our original submission). We revised the manuscript over the course of several months and resubmitted with all the requested data, which greatly improved the paper. After another, positive round of reviews we were asked to make some additional cosmetic changes and the manuscript was finally accepted a year after the initial submission.