Cenk -

I have been on "both ends" of this. As a reviewer I have spent a great deal of effort to do a good job, and then for the same 'prestigious' journal I have received a referee's report that was laughably incorrect. As a US Government employee, not an academician, there was no "publish or perish" motivation, quite the opposite, so rather than invest effort in such journals, I for the most part just wrote papers for proceedings and less "prestigious" publications, so that I could archive methods, and ResearchGate was later suggested to me as a place to do that. From the experiences I had I can sympathize with your plight, but I don't think there is a lot you can do about it. I suppose that one problem is a scarcity of people willing to act as referees.

There have been other such complaints on ResearchGate. I think a big problem is the past dominance of hardcopy journals and the business models of some large publishers, perhaps. Some statistics journals, mostly survey statistics, of which I am aware, are run by some national statistical agencies, and their profit motives are not that kind of a problem, though one I'm thinking about, at least at one time, was known for taking up to two years to publish an article. I'm thinking that a lack of willing referees is the universal problem.

I think that as more open access journals (not of the predatory nature) publish more good articles, more traditional journals are going to have to change. However, the dearth of willing, available, and competent referees will likely remain a problem.

Best wishes - Jim Knaub

PS - Another problem which will impact some papers more than others may be when there is a clique of like-minded people with influence at a journal who are in favor of one method over another. I have a friend who was a coauthor on a paper which was rejected by a 'prestigious' journal, only to be accepted by a much more prestigious journal which covered a wider range of statistics. The first journal was known to favor an alternate method to the one favored by the paper. Of course all of this delayed eventual publication.

The long review times can be very frustrating. What one can do is to monitor your submission, if by 6 weeks there is no indication of a reviewer, one can withdraw and send to another journal. But it is always good to check the review process of journals by checking articles that have been publish in the journal and the journal speciification before submitting a paper to a journal.

A very interesting question. I hope you reach for a better end on this.

HI

I think if they ppl put a long gap to review either article or research paper..i think it becomes frustrating .....there should be some time limitation and reviewer automatically will be bound to finish his or her work ..within that duration,..if that is not fulfilled with 25 days gap time ...a person should automatically withdraw his or her article or research work and sent it to other source...but prior to withdraw one message should be sent to them , that i have withdrawn my research paper and i am sending it to other journal...

TO AVOID DUPLICACY

I will put the blame on the editorial boards. It's a clear indication of the lethargy of the editorial board. Editorial board as the main responsible body of the journal they have to make sure to pass a judgement to the authors either their papers are accepted or rejected. The editors have to deal with the reviewers to get back their review reports within a reasonable time so that papers are not unreasonably delayed. If the problem is authors not attending to reviewer's comments, even for that editors should issue deadlines. All the blame should go to the editors of such journals. They should either accept or reject within a limited time. Delaying is definitely not a good way forward.

Journals must have 'standards' for each activity and those must be reasonable and transparent. Review part is one of the key areas!

I submitted one of the research papers of mine in a journal by Emrald last year in August 2020. Till now I have done two revisions and last revision was submitted in April 2021. I have been waiting since then for the decision by editors and it has been a long and a demotivating process since then. I have published two more papers between time period But, regarding this paper there is no communication from the editors.

if too short a time to review an item is a bad sign of quality, then too long a time is not necessarily a guarantee of quality and I know of examples of this type.

Respect=Time

When there are good reasons to reject an article, those reasons should be pretty obvious. In this case, for a reviewer that do its job well, the rejection has to be pretty quick. It is not a question of "studying" an article and then to reject it 12 months later. When a paper takes 12 months, the decision must be at least a "major revision". If it takes two years and leads to rejection, there is reason to believe that there is a lack of seriousness or a bad intention for a non-objective (non-ethical) reason.

Enlightening thread! Thanks to the questioner and the contributors.

I know what that feels like. I had the same experience with the journal of "Applied Soft Computing." Desk rejected after a month and half of waiting on the grounds of "lack of novelty," whatever that means since the article was full of "novel" contributions from the beginning to the end.

Whenever I have a bad experience with a journal, I tend not to submit my work their, unless I have no better option. This is part of the publishing game we authors have to endure. It's annoying but what can we do?