Frontiers in Oncology

The magazine's Impact Factor (IF) has steadily increased in recent years. The IF for the years 2018 to 2021 were 4.416, 4.137, 4.848, and 6.244, respectively. It is expected that the IF, to be announced next year, will decrease to some extent. Overall, both the Associate Editor (AE) and the reviewers are very friendly. A comprehensive review article was submitted in early May and assigned to an American AE. It was revised on June 5th after receiving feedback from three reviewers. One of the reviewers gave a full rating and directly recommended acceptance. The other two reviewers provided additional comments based on the research progress in the field, which were very pertinent. After carefully revising for two weeks, it was resubmitted. The next day, the other two reviewers endorsed it and recommended acceptance. After that, the AE assessed the article, which took a little over a week, and then it was submitted to the editorial board. On the evening of June 30th, when the 2021 IF was announced by Clarivate Analytics, it was accepted.

I thought it was a graduation magazine, after all, everyone knows it's not good. The Frontiers series has also been labeled as a predatory journal. I didn't expect it to be so slow. It has been over three months and the first review result hasn't come out yet. I tried to withdraw the submission by sending emails, but they refused to let me withdraw. I sent three withdrawal emails one after another, each time providing reasons such as finding the reviewers, but they still didn't provide the first review result. Their reputation was already bad, and now they might have realized their mistake and want to make changes by increasing reviewers and extending the review period to lower the evaluation of their own low-quality journal. Overall, the evaluation is: extremely slow, no withdrawal allowed. If anyone wants to submit, they should take their chances and be cautious.