INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MOLECULAR SCIENCES

The academic editor of this journal seems like a mysterious figure behind the scenes. Contact emails can only be communicated through the assistant editor (intermediary), and the assistant editor always replies with PR speeches, which is quite tiring. It took three months for the journal to review our manuscript, with four rounds of revisions. It has been three months since the third round of revisions, and the academic editor of the journal directly rejected the manuscript but strongly encouraged us to revise it according to the reviewers' comments and resubmit. After revising the manuscript, we resubmitted it and entered the review process again, which is the fourth round of review. After receiving minor revision comments from the reviewers, the journal's editorial office and the assistant editor were very eager to publish our manuscript as soon as possible. Of course, after being rejected, we also wrote a full A4 page of cover letter to the academic editor, assistant editor, and the journal's editorial office when resubmitting the manuscript. After revising the manuscript, our paper was published within just three days, and the acceptance date was written as the time when we resubmitted the rejected manuscript, not the time of the first submission. What a scheme!

April 8, 2023: Submission
May 15, 2023: Major revision with comments from three reviewers. The comments from the first and second reviewers were fair, while the third reviewer raised many questions regarding the mechanism. A 10-day revision period was given.
May 24, 2023: Revised.
June 12, 2023: Minor revision with an additional question from the third reviewer. The academic editor provided four pages of questions, showing great attention to detail and strict adherence to formatting guidelines. They noticed issues such as italics in formulas, a missing letter in a word, and a missing period. They had strict requirements for figures and tables, so I had to redo them. Five days were given for revision.
June 16, 2023: Revised.
June 18, 2023: Accepted.
June 19, 2023: Proofreading, with one day given.
June 21, 2023: Proofreading again, this time focusing on the cities of the manufacturers of reagents and instruments.
June 23, 2023: Online.
This journal is very rigorous, paying careful attention to every small detail. The revision timeline was relatively tight. The first and second reviewers were relatively fast, taking 10 days, but the third reviewer took over a month.