Hello Hello,
So here is my recent experience with the Journal of Clinical Medicine from the House of MDPI.
So I submitted my manuscript and everything was going great. The reviewer reports came in.
Reviewer 1, asked me to add some figures to improve the reader understanding and add some pathway diagrams to highlight the issue. Fair enough, I did the best I could.
And as expected the reviewer even accpeted the changes, and gave us a green light for publication,
But we had a roadblock in the form of Reviewer 2.
The individual had marked everything MUST BE IMPROVED (Image 1) . Okay, must have some mistakes, that I shall work on.
But none of the comments were like this is wrong rectify or this can be improved. The comments were
1. Abstract is 276 words as compared to given limit of 200.
2. References are not in given format.
3. The study uses Independent Reviewers for systematic review, they have not been mentioned in author list.
4. HAND SEARCH for systematic review has not been done.
5. Intext citations have been mentioned by names and not numbers.
I did my best and explained the reason why HAND SEARCH was not a viable option. I went ahead and explained the role of independent reviewers and how they work. I told the reviewer that names of authors and study year needs to be mentioned rather than just piutting a number. I rectified the references and even cleared other minor issues like missing '[' and expanded CINAHL.
But this reviewer somehow still managed to say that none of the issues have been rectified and he is not happy with the work, and decided to reject our work.
What comes next is Editor, remarking REJECT AND DECLINE RESUBMISSION. Why?
Do the authors have permission to use the figures?? We never got to answer that question. And voila we successfully wasted 2 months.
Just because a reviewer felt that reviewers should also be provided with an authorship, and my abstract went overboard with the number of words.
Care to guide me on this!!
- Badges
- Science method