All reviews received by SciRev

Motivation: We experienced serious delays and issues during the review process, raising serious concerns about the reliability and overall quality of the journal.

The first review round took 2.5 months. The revised version of our manuscript was submitted on February 1, 2017. Then, our understanding was that the manuscript passed the technical check and was submitted to the Academic Editor (likely the same who revised the paper the first time). In fact, the status of the manuscript in the editorial manager changed from "Manuscript submitted to the journal" to "With the Editor".

After two months, we asked an update on the revision status and we were told that our manuscript was "currently being sent out for assignment to an Academic Editor" (a different one?). After that, the status returned to "Manuscript submitted to the journal" and remained the same for 30 days.

After three months from the new submission, the Editorial Office failed to find an Academic
Editor and eventually stopped replying to our emails. Therefore, although all the requests from the reviewers were addressed properly, we decided to withdraw the manuscript from further consideration by the journal.

Motivation: The review process was okay, but after acceptance something went wrong technically with the Elsevier system, and the last version of my article was lost in cyberspace. It took me many phonecalls (to India) and e-mails with the publisher's office to set it straight.

Motivation: The reviewers comments were good and relevant, but no clear reason was given for the rejection, as the shortcomings mentioned would have been easy to fix.

Motivation: The rejection by editor was extremel fast and the rejection letter was nice - the editor commented that the manuscript is well prepared and interesting, but probably too niche for the wide readership of ACS Nano.

Motivation: JMIR offers a rigorous, efficient and fair review process. The quality of the comments and criticisms from both reviewers was excellent. The reviewers offered constructive feedback, which helped us to improve the paper.

Motivation: Editor copy/pasted a line from summary in conciliatory decision letter. Suggested we publish in Nature Communications (which has $6K article processing fee).

Motivation: I did not hear back from the journal for over a month after the initial submission, so I wrote to find out if it was being sent to review or not. They informed me that it had been sent out for review, but it would have been nice if they would have told me that instead of having to seek out that information. Then it took over 4 months to receive the outcome of the first review, which I find excessive. The worst though is that since it was accepted I waited over 2 months for a first proof, which was full of errors, I requested a second proof be sent, which took 3 weeks and was again full of errors, some of which were the same as the previous proof... it is still yet to be published almost 4 months after accepting it and will now be pushed back to the May issue (6 months from accepted date).

Motivation: A very smooth and timely process, with constructive criticism given by the reviewers.

Motivation: The review process was fast. Good manuscript tracking system. The editor was kind.

Motivation: A thoroughly disheartening and shambolic process. First set of reviews: 2 positive, 1 negative. Response of editor: "One of the referees had very major criticisms of your paper. If you believe you can fully address the deficiencies then we would be willing to see a radically revised version. However I should advise you that we would send it back to the same referee. You might therefore want to think carefully whether you wish to do this or consider another journal." We thought carefully, but decided to resubmit because the reviewer had misunderstood some basic methodological details and also made erroneous comments about the statistical analyses. So, of course we could address his/her petty concerns!
In addition to the detailed response to the reviewer, we sent a letter to the editor explaining that we were concerned about possible bias and the various errors s/he had made, providing detailed and blunter rebuttals than would have been sensible to put in the 'response to reviewers' document. The editor is after all an elder statesman of psychiatry, and would obviously make a wise and considered judgement? So we waited for about 2 months and eventually were told the review (singular) had been received and that a decision was imminent. A further two weeks went by and still no word. When we enquired, we were then told that the paper had been sent out for review AGAIN. We thought this was a good sign, believing that the negative reviewer's views must have remained unchanged after the revision and that the sage editor had decided that the fairest course of action was to get a fourth/fifth opinion. And then, two days after that we were told that the paper was rejected (i.e. before the re-re-review). We were only sent the negative reviewer's second set of comments (which predictably contained a series of additional concerns).
It is of course possible that we were viewing our work through rose tinted glasses, seeing it as a major breakthrough in psychiatry (the two positive reviewers took a more modest view of our work, but commended it as important, nonetheless) and that the negative reviewer was right to criticise our work (and the editor right to reject it on the basis of that criticism). But it really concerns me that the editor was so willingly and credulously swayed by a reviewer whose comments, by any measure of pettiness, were trivial and/or based on a misunderstanding of the literature and statistical methods. My feeling was that our fate was sealed after the first reviews and the fairest thing would have been to definitively put us out of our misery at that stage. Instead we waited >5 months to receive a really ill considered decision.

Motivation: We received constructive comments which were easy to address. The editor was very prompt to accept the article. Overall I am very satisfied by World Development. This is the second time I have an article accepted and the overall process is constructive and relatively fast.

Motivation: The review process was fair and the editorial staff moderated the reviews well.

Motivation: The review process was good overall. The review I received was detailed and showed that the reviewer engaged with the article. The majority of suggestions were very useful and significantly improved my article, while just a few were misunderstandings.

Motivation: When a reviewer was delayed in uploading their comments, the journal reached out to me to share a status update, which I greatly appreciated. Appreciated relatively quick turnaround times.