Dur. 1st rev. rnd
Tot. handling time
Imm. rejection time
Num. rev. reports
Report quality
Overall rating
Outcome
Year
24.1 weeks
69.0 weeks
n/a
3 reports
Rejected
2025
Motivation:
This is the worst peer review experience I've had thus far. The first round of review was good and smooth and took less than half a year. We got comments from three reviewers, and all of them were positive about the manuscript and gave meaningful suggestions to strengthen the manuscript. We amended the manuscript and resubmitted it accordingly.
It was the second round of review that was extremely terrible and unpleasant. The review took almost one year and a half to complete. We sent several emails to the editorial office requesting information, but did not get any response at all. Eventually, the final decision was a rejection, which we think is extremely unfair:
1) we got comments from only one reviewer, who, apparently, was a new reviewer and not involved in the first round of review - his/her comments were substantially different from those raised by the initial reviewers. While we understand new reviewers could be invited, we expected them to focus on assessing our revisions and whether they sufficiently and appropriately address the initial reviewers' concerns. In fact, it appears that this new reviewer did not read the initial reviewers' comments and our response at all. The decision to reject our revised manuscript based solely on this new reviewer's comments and without considering the initial reviewers' comments and our response is outrightly unfair.
2) the review lacks transparency to such a degree that we can't even clearly know whether the initial reviewers withdrew from the review or whether new reviewers were invited.
3) the comments from the only reviewer are actually not at all that negative. They can be addressed with some more explanations in the manuscript, since he/she is mainly asking for further clarifications/justifications of various constructs. However, we were not given any opportunity to revise the manuscript. This is extremely unfair given that these comments were not raised in the first round of review.
4) no further explanation from the editor is given as to why the decision is a rejection. Actually, we think the reason is that the second round of review took too long and the editor might not want to deal with the manuscript anymore, and so he/she wanted to conclude the process at this point. However, this has nothing to do with the quality of our revised manuscript. I don't think the editor handled our revised manuscript professionally.
Anyways, our impression is that the revised manuscript was handled in a disappointingly unprofessional manner. I would not suggest anyone to publish in this journal.
It was the second round of review that was extremely terrible and unpleasant. The review took almost one year and a half to complete. We sent several emails to the editorial office requesting information, but did not get any response at all. Eventually, the final decision was a rejection, which we think is extremely unfair:
1) we got comments from only one reviewer, who, apparently, was a new reviewer and not involved in the first round of review - his/her comments were substantially different from those raised by the initial reviewers. While we understand new reviewers could be invited, we expected them to focus on assessing our revisions and whether they sufficiently and appropriately address the initial reviewers' concerns. In fact, it appears that this new reviewer did not read the initial reviewers' comments and our response at all. The decision to reject our revised manuscript based solely on this new reviewer's comments and without considering the initial reviewers' comments and our response is outrightly unfair.
2) the review lacks transparency to such a degree that we can't even clearly know whether the initial reviewers withdrew from the review or whether new reviewers were invited.
3) the comments from the only reviewer are actually not at all that negative. They can be addressed with some more explanations in the manuscript, since he/she is mainly asking for further clarifications/justifications of various constructs. However, we were not given any opportunity to revise the manuscript. This is extremely unfair given that these comments were not raised in the first round of review.
4) no further explanation from the editor is given as to why the decision is a rejection. Actually, we think the reason is that the second round of review took too long and the editor might not want to deal with the manuscript anymore, and so he/she wanted to conclude the process at this point. However, this has nothing to do with the quality of our revised manuscript. I don't think the editor handled our revised manuscript professionally.
Anyways, our impression is that the revised manuscript was handled in a disappointingly unprofessional manner. I would not suggest anyone to publish in this journal.