Dur. 1st rev. rnd
Tot. handling time
Imm. rejection time
Num. rev. reports
Report quality
Overall rating
Outcome
Year
39.1 weeks
39.1 weeks
n/a
2 reports
0
1
Rejected
2010
Motivation: After about five months of waiting to see if my coauthored manuscript was sent out for review or rejected outright, I began emailing the editorial staff and the editor of the journal to see if correspondence from them to me had been lost or if my manuscript that I submitted had been lost. I did not hear a word from them for many weeks. After 8 months, I received an e-mail stating that they were waiting for one last reviewer to submit a response. After 9 months I received a casual e-mail from my coauthor stating that she was sad that the journal rejected our article. I suspected that the journal sent their official response to her and not to me. I sent a last e-mail asking that the journal please send me the reviews and the editor's decision because I was the corresponding author. I was surprised about what I received after 9 months of waiting and many e-mails inquiring what I could do from my end to help locate any lost correspondences. There were only two reviews. One was one paragraph and the other was one page long. Both suggested that the article be rejected outright, but neither offered details to support the decision or suggestions for improvement. To this day, I don't know why it took 9 months to receive two reviews comprising only a page and one paragraph worth of comments. By the way, I immediately submitted my article to another prestigious journal in criminology and received three excellent reviews with many insightful and engaging critiques and suggestions. After revising the manuscript, the paper was accepted and one reviewer (the most critical and insightful), commented that the paper was destined to become a classic in the field. The stark contrast between my review experiences could, of course, have much to do with scholarly differences of opinion in the field and the importance of finding a good fit between a manuscript and a journal. But, still, 9 months seems too long to wait to receive two scant and extremely disengaged reviews.