Energy Reports

I previously submitted my paper to ECM and it was transferred to this journal. I didn't know much about this journal, but since it was in the second tier, I agreed to transfer it. The article is about a new approach to thermal performance analysis and experimental verification, which is a small but conventional innovation. The process was very fast, submitted on March 4th, with editor on March 7th, under review on March 8th, received minor revisions on March 24th, and after making the revisions, it was uploaded on April 10th, and the tracking system was initiated. One of the reviewers completed the second round of review, but the other one never responded until April 29th when it became "with editor". Then the editor found another reviewer, and on May 10th, it was accepted. The entire review process was very efficient, possibly due to the recommended reviewers. However, after looking at previous papers in this journal, I found that there are a lot of conference papers and their quality is not on the same level as regular research papers that are actually published (the difference between ordinary EI and SCI second-tier papers may be even greater). The acceptance rate displayed in the system probably includes those low-quality conference papers. I hope that in the future, the journal can focus less on making money from conferences and instead consider the many good regular papers. However, for now, being in the second tier of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it is still worth submitting some theoretical and analytical papers. Overall, the speed advantage is significant, but the quality of the accepted conference papers is really not up to par.

I submitted a paper on numerical simulation, and the review process was fast. The first review took 15 days, and the second review took about a week. However, the editorial process was slow. The manuscript stayed with the editor for a long time, and the whole process took nearly 3 months. There were four reviewers, two of whom provided professional opinions, while the other two had less expertise and the editor only requested minor revisions. The publication fee was 14,000 RMB, which is considered cheap for an Open Access journal. Although the impact factor for the year 2021 is lower at around 4.87 compared to 6.87 in 2020, considering the popularity of the energy field, journals with "Energy" in their name tend to have increasing impact factors. Therefore, the future impact factor of this journal should not be too low. I suggest that everyone should try submitting their not-so-good papers to Open Access journals, as they are relatively easy to get published in and it still counts as SCI second quartile.