All reviews received by SciRev

Motivation: Upon acceptance, authors made the payment in April 2023. However, until now (September) the paper has not been published. We have contacted PLos One too many times but received no response from the journal regarding to when the paper is to be published online. We consider the action of Plos One to be very unprofessional and perhaps unethical.

Motivation: 1- You don't have to spend half a year of your life and of the authors' life to reject their work, you sent your comments and reviews 3 different times, which could be done at the same time.
The first time you asked me about some clinical details which I have done.
The second time you asked to change the title, update references and do some format changes, which I did.
The last time: commenting on the abstract and rejecting my work.
All of that could have been done the first time, no need to waste your time, as such mine.

2- THE IMPORTANT point is the cause of your rejection: You angrily mentioned that the author is refusing to make changes which is previously suggested about updating the references and the maximum is 4 references more than 5 years. You really look like you didn't review my edited article well, as I sent you the file with only 3 references dated more than 5 years.

3- The last reviewers' comments carry a poor professional manner and bad communication:
You could reject my work but still, talk in a nice way using supportive sentences that encourage me to submit another work to your journal later on.
You have used a lot of abbreviations and had a quick judgment about the cause that you used to reject my work.

4- I am not sure I am the only one to be treated in such a manner by your journal reviewers. Still, I do suggest carrying out an audit, or a quality improvement project, involving most of the work submitted to your journal and doing a root cause analysis about the outcomes, the reviews, the times of reviewers' comments, and the timeline till the decision. I am sure if you do that, and are dedicated to improving your journal performance, I am sure this will improve your journal H INDEX.

5- Finally, I wish you all the best and look forward to submitting new work with you soon.

Motivation: My experience with SN Computer Science was horrible: I originally submitted my article on 11th November 2022 and today, 28th June 2023, the article is still in the status "editor assigned". 7 months of time wasted!

Motivation: The handling of this manuscript at all levels was somewhere between incompetent and unethical. The first pair of reviews wasn't so great, but at least resubmission was solicited. The one review of the revision was very brief and made the bizarre claims that (1) what I'm trying to do is categorically impossible, which if true would invalidate literally thousands of papers that use such approaches; and (2) there are too many papers of this kind in the literature already – not that the topic is boring, but rather that they don't want more research published in this area regardless of whether it's novel and sound. The handling editor accepted the latter argument, which is anti-scientific. The three editors-in-chief said specifically that they "discussed and agreed the decision", so it wasn't an oversight on their part.

Motivation: The manuscript faced rejection due to being beyond the scope of the journal. However, it was subsequently transferred to another journal where it was accepted for publication.

Motivation: Our study received one positive and one negative review. The negative review with the suggestion of rejection was (1) extremely short and (2) not supported by any references. One part of the reasons for rejection was extremely general and could be applied to almost any study in our field. Another part contained a few statements nearly opposite to how the methodology and results of the study were described. In brief, all these statements were either not relevant to the study (we showed that it was not the case) or not supported by any reference, law, or observations (no one knows if they are true or not). While statements without any support are just not constructive or scientific, direct misinformation about the study's limitations suggests a poor or motivated revision. After a resubmission in which all the listed potential limitations were discussed, the same reviewer just repeated nearly the same text, not providing a single reference to support his or her claims. Such revisions may break the concept of goodwill, as both our study and some other studies were described by a reviewer with a clear sign of misinformation (even after resubmission). Moreover, when an editor cannot distinguish between constructive and non-constructive revisions because of a different background or field of study, such a process becomes very vulnerable to motivated revisions.

Motivation: Although my manuscript was rejected, at least it was quick and painless so minimal time was wasted

Motivation: Referee report was positive and seemed to suggest acceptance with minor revision but paper was rejected due to space limitations. It was suggested to send the article to the Asian Journal of Mathematics instead.

Motivation: The associate editor asked us to transfer to ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Motivation: The editor based their decision (almost) exclusively on the negative report of one reviewer, ignoring the positive reports of two other reviewers. The decision letter almost only emphasizes the negative aspects contained in the referee reports, to the point of giving a biased interpretation of what is stated in the (positive) reports. For completeness, the manuscript was sent to a fourth reviewer who advocated for an immediate rejection due to plagiarism, since a previous version of the manuscript was available as a working paper (of course, my co-author and I had written the working paper version as well). The editor stated they did not consider this report to make the final decision, which probably contributed to the rather long review process since they had to find additional reviewers.

Motivation: The review process was very professionally handled with timely treatment by the editors. However, I felt that the reviewers were somewhat unreasonable in their reasons for recommending rejection and I wish the editor had intervened to see the big picture. Oh well.

Motivation: The first round of review actually resulted in a rejection from editor but with very encouraging notes on the findings. We did a very thorough reanalysis with the helpful input from the reviewers, and have significantly rewritten the manuscript. Eventually, we appealed the decision and got a second round of review with success. The process is long but rewarding and I thank the editor for rejecting our first draft.

Motivation: This manuscript was sent to Chem Eur J after some poor reviewing by Angew Chem Int Ed. Fortunately, based on the quality of the work, the Editor at Angew Chem contacted the EiC of Chem Eur J. The manuscript was accepted very quickly at the latter venue. I am grateful for the approach taken by the Editors of the two journals as it saves a lot of onerous work for the authors and possibly reviewers (and there is nothing more inexcusable than a desk rejection that many journals practice).

Motivation: The speed of review and reviewers' choice were good. There was an unexpected delay during review after first revision, which can be avoided. Otherwise the process was all smoother

Motivation: The process of submitting and reviewing the manuscript went seamlessly. The reviewers offered valuable feedback to enhance the strength of the manuscript.