National Science Review

On March 1, 2022, I submitted a paper through the system of A*STAR in Singapore. For 30 days, the system status consistently showed "Awaiting admin processing." Since I had never encountered such a situation, I emailed the journal to inquire about the status of my manuscript. The assistant's reply was, "We will arrange for the initial review soon." The next day, unsurprisingly, I received a rejection letter, which was a template rejection and clearly showed that they did not even read the content of my article (probably because the corresponding author was not a well-known figure). After submitting papers for so many years, this is the first time I have encountered such a frustrating journal. They didn't provide an initial review within 30 days and rejected it as soon as I pushed for an update. Our group strongly boycotts such journals! Everyone, take care of yourselves, and if you don't agree, try submitting your own articles (excluding those in the prominent authors' group). I have all the records of my submissions, reminder emails, and rejection letters, and I am not afraid to report them!

The timeline for submission has been carefully reviewed. It can be said that the efficiency of NSR editors is quite high. The comments from the first review were very professional and recognized the work. Of course, there were also sharp questions in the review comments, so a lot of experiments and theories were added. NSR has a high positioning, and there are many groundbreaking and record-breaking works in it, expecting further expansion of influence. We are all highly educated researchers and should not be sour grapes. Objectively speaking, as long as the work is sufficiently in place, the editors will definitely give it serious consideration.