Dur. 1st rev. rnd
Tot. handling time
Imm. rejection time
Num. rev. reports
Report quality
Overall rating
Outcome
Year
4.3 weeks
9.3 weeks
n/a
2 reports
3
4
Accepted
2025
Motivation: Good and efficient editorial work. Reviews were of good quality, mostly.
n/a
n/a
50 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
2024
Motivation: After almost 50 days from the date of manuscript submission, the editorial office informed me that my manuscript was rejected, actually without obvious reason, just the repeated common words “Although your manuscript falls within the aim and scope of this journal, it is being declined due to lack of sufficient novelty. We receive a much larger number of papers than we are able to accept”. They did not adequately consider the manuscript as evidenced by the lack of reviewers’ comments and the suggestion of submitting my manuscript to another journal which has a scoop completely different from my manuscript scope. The bad thing is that they kept the manuscript for 50 days for nothing, although they claim the Time to First Decision is 11 days.
n/a
n/a
88 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
2024
Motivation: Manuscript status was "under review" for 6 weeks, but it was unclear whether this was editorial or peer review. After contacting the publisher for an update, the status changed to "decision in process". After another 6 weeks, a decision was made: "Although your manuscript falls within the aim and scope of this journal, it is being declined due to lack of sufficient novelty. We receive a much larger number of papers than we are able to accept." This message was under "Reviewers' comments" in the letter, but no other comments were provided, so it's still unclear whether this manuscript was peer reviewed or not. It appears to be a desk rejection, but a desk rejection after 3 months seems excessive.
5.0 weeks
5.0 weeks
n/a
2 reports
4
4
Accepted
2021
Motivation: The review process was fast. The editor handled the manuscript very professionally.
One major and one minor review in the first round. One reviewer accepted with minor corrections. The second one has a concern about the data sampling approach. Editor asked for the opinion of a third reviewer. The third reviewer accepted the author's reasoning and reply to the second reviewer's comments. Finally, it was accepted on June 8, 2022
n/a
n/a
0 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
2019
Motivation: Fast decision.
10.7 weeks
25.9 weeks
n/a
4 reports
2
1
Rejected
2019
29.0 weeks
34.4 weeks
n/a
2 reports
3
3
Accepted
2018
16.6 weeks
21.3 weeks
n/a
3 reports
3
4
Accepted
2018
n/a
n/a
6 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
2015
Motivation: I had seen several other papers published in this journal with the similar research area. Surprisingly, the editor thought that our manuscript's not within the scope of the JEMA!
3.9 weeks
6.4 weeks
n/a
2 reports
2
2
Accepted
2017
Motivation: One referee made useless comments like "you should change the text" or "let someone who is a native speaker check the English" (even though my co-author is native English speaker and the manuscript was checked by a professional proof-reading agency). Additionally, the reviewer was demanding information which was definitely included in the manuscript. Still I tried to address all his/ her comments in a satisfying way. Yet, in the end the reviewer rejected with the sentence "It looks like a normal paper". No helpful comments during the whole process. Luckily, when I contacted the Editor, he agreed with me and exchanged the one reviewer. Ulitmately, the paper was accepted.
31.0 weeks
31.0 weeks
n/a
2 reports
1
1
Rejected
2015
Motivation: (1) It takes super long time to get response from the journal and the reviewing results (more than half a year).
(2) The comments given by the reviewers were, to my opinion, not professional enough. They do not understand the design of our field experiments, but they didn't even ask us to explain the reason of the design but just said it's not realistic and reject. Another example is, one reviewer criticized we didn't include energy consumption of irrigation at farm in our energy balance and required us to recalculate the whole balance. But we didn't use irrigation at the farm at all.

Overall speaking, my experience with Journal of Environmental Management this time was not good. However, we still learned something from the experience.