Dur. 1st rev. rnd
Tot. handling time
Imm. rejection time
Num. rev. reports
Report quality
Overall rating
Outcome
Year
5.9 weeks
31.7 weeks
n/a
3 reports
Rejected
2022
Motivation:
The first round of review was rather fast. However, out of 3 reviews, 2 where troublesome:
- The first one was about another submission than mine! Possibly the reviewer swapped two parallel reviews when submitting; possibly the problem lied in the journal information system. Anyway, the managing editor did not notice, which in itself, means something. I immediately contacted the editor, but my email remained unanswered.
- The second one was essentially a reviewer’s attempt to coerce citations (like explained in https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/35/18/3217/5304360?login=true) which is ethically questionable. Concretely, the review was built around a list of 13 papers supposedly about the subject, among which 11 were from the same research group (good point: the other two papers were meaningful indeed). The editor did not notice too, but considering the absence of answer to my first email, I did not email about the ethical concern raised by this second review.
- The third one was a classical review, with a summary of the article, a short highlight of its strengths, followed by few major concerns and a list of minor issues. As this review was enriching, I decided to revise and resubmit despite the 2 other reviews. A noticeable fact was that the managing editor changed in between.
The second round appeared to be longer than the first. Long after the average time claimed on the journal website (8 to 12 weeks), I contacted the editor, and I received a void response (something like, "sorry, but it depends on the reviewers' responsiveness"). All my further emails/inquiries remained unresponded to.
Finally, after almost 26 weeks, considering this was longer than necessary to evaluate a revised paper, I withdrawn my submission by email.
- The first one was about another submission than mine! Possibly the reviewer swapped two parallel reviews when submitting; possibly the problem lied in the journal information system. Anyway, the managing editor did not notice, which in itself, means something. I immediately contacted the editor, but my email remained unanswered.
- The second one was essentially a reviewer’s attempt to coerce citations (like explained in https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/35/18/3217/5304360?login=true) which is ethically questionable. Concretely, the review was built around a list of 13 papers supposedly about the subject, among which 11 were from the same research group (good point: the other two papers were meaningful indeed). The editor did not notice too, but considering the absence of answer to my first email, I did not email about the ethical concern raised by this second review.
- The third one was a classical review, with a summary of the article, a short highlight of its strengths, followed by few major concerns and a list of minor issues. As this review was enriching, I decided to revise and resubmit despite the 2 other reviews. A noticeable fact was that the managing editor changed in between.
The second round appeared to be longer than the first. Long after the average time claimed on the journal website (8 to 12 weeks), I contacted the editor, and I received a void response (something like, "sorry, but it depends on the reviewers' responsiveness"). All my further emails/inquiries remained unresponded to.
Finally, after almost 26 weeks, considering this was longer than necessary to evaluate a revised paper, I withdrawn my submission by email.