Reviews for "Scientific Reports"

Motivation: This has been the worst journal I dealt with.
We wait for 45 days, than for 45 working days and still nothing. Then we wrote to the office and they explained they are in a search for a senior editor, since no one was willing to handle our paper. Then the editor was finally found. From the end of April until the beginning of August, they could not find 2 reviewers. Then we drew back the paper.

Motivation: Manuscript was handled very well. It took a while before an editor was assigned, but once it got assigned, we received the review reports rather fast, they were useful to improve the manuscript (it did not require heavy work as they were minor comments in general). After 1 round we resubmitted and 3 reviewers (2 from before and 1 new) checked the manuscript and accept for publication was the final decision. No further changes were asked.

Motivation: First review round needed 6.4 weeks. This is not so short but I expected longer time would be required for this round. The comments from reviewers are good and contribute to improve my manuscript. Second review round needed 2 weeks and this is acceptable. New submission system they introduced is helpful. Some information of the reviewing progress can be obtained from the system.

Motivation: We resubmitted our revised manuscript with comments to the five reviewers. Then, the handling editor lost communication. The reason was not disclosed. The second round was then abandoned for about six months. I contacted the editorial support team numerous times, but all they said was that the handling editor was still unresponsive. Eventually, the handling editor was changed, and the manuscript was rejected. We wasted our time. TWe will never submit our manuscript to this journal again.

Motivation: The reviewers and chief editor were great. I really appreciate their hard work.

Motivation: Extremely long process to assign the paper to the reviewers . Reviewers and editor were expert in the field and almost every suggestion improved the overall quality if the paper.

Motivation: The most surprising thing was that the journal needed 1 month to assign the paper to an editor, that we never know who she/he was. Then, although the information on the website read as "review received" the editorial decision was not made until one month later.

Motivation: A so called "Quality Check stage" was ridiculously long, bizarre, and inept. Apparently, it was done at a very remote location because it took several days for the editorial support to respond to the amended versions. It took about two weeks before our manuscript has finally reached the editor. The same happened after reviews of the revision.
We were lucky with one of the reviewers, whose comments were knowledgeable and professional. We were not that lucky with the second reviewer, which rigorously focused on minor things like abbreviations, references formatting, grammatical terms etc. rather than on a subject matter of the manuscript. He/she was the reason for the second revision: few commas were missing, and few abbreviations were not consistent. We think handling editor should have been more decisive or certain before requesting the second insignificant revision. Overall, those were the factors that affected our scores here, at SciRev. It is not the first time we've been having quite a gloomy experience with the Scientific Reports: several years ago, our manuscript was in submission there for more than six months until we finally withdraw it due to delay. It turned out one reviewer approved it for publication, and they've been waiting for the second one to respond. Could have found another reviewer instead.

Motivation: The reviewing and editorial process was very slow. I sent an corresponding email 3 times without respond. I have to contact the customer suport for their help, which thay told me there is some issue about the editorial process that make the decision took more than 6 months. In general, this is a good journal and the reviewers' comments were good, but the editorial process was too slow (maybe due to COVID?).

Motivation: We had to revise our paper two times before it was accepted. First, we received two reviews. After revising the manuscript, it was accepted by one but declined by the other reviewer. The editor asked a third person to review the manuscript who also suggested to accept it. The editor, therefore, gave us a second opportunity to revise the manuscript. We did and after this it was accepted, even though one reviewer still wasn't completelly convinced by the paper. The second review process was quite long, but when we asked the editorial staff we always received prompt and helpful answers.

Motivation: Extremely slow processing time, I would not recommend publishing in this journal.

Motivation: Six months for an initial review round is quite long, the editor was extremely hands-off (e.g. did not add a single word of text beyond generic responses), and we only received one review, which the online portal said was submitted in May (we received it in August as they were waiting for additional reviews). The reviewer was an expert in the field and added considerably to the manuscript, which made the process worthwhile. Still, I will likely submit to one of the other open-access journals next time.

Motivation: The Editor -an established expert in the field- handled the manuscript promptly and very well, sending it to an intellectual giant in the field. The reviews were of very high quality and the comments straightforward to address.
It was a pleasure to have such a smooth and high-quality review process.

Motivation: It took the journal 4 months to find a handling editor, and then it took another 2 months to find reviewers. The reviews I got back consisted of Reviewer 1 contributing primarily a copy edit job of grammatical and sentence restructuring instead of actual feedback on the content in the MS and Reviewer 2 asking for the inclusion of four references, three of which were from the same working group along with one other request for revision of the title and abstract.