Frontiers in Microbiology

First, let me share my submission process.

Submitted on June 23, 2022.

Assigned editor and external review on June 27, 2022. The editor is Jayesh Jagannath Ahire. I would like to thank him for his fairness, which will be mentioned later.

Reviewer 2's comments received on July 1, 2022. First review agreed to publish with 3 minor formatting issues mentioned.

Reviewer 3's comments received on July 7, 2022. First review agreed to publish with some minor discussion issues mentioned.

Reviewer 1's comments received on July 12, 2022. The key point here is that I want to expose the name of this reviewer, Assar Ali Shah, so that everyone knows about this person and can be cautious in the future. This reviewer provided me with a list of 10 of their own references, without mentioning anything substantial about my article in the review comments. It was just a sentence, suggesting to refer to the following papers for rewriting the introduction and discussion. Isn't this a disguised way of forcing the author to cite their own work? Moreover, I searched for some of the papers that he reviewed for Frontiers in Microbiology, and they all included the references he listed. However, the citations of his references in the papers and the context were not very appropriate, and they were not closely related to the whole paper. Fortunately, Jayesh, the editor, noticed this issue in time and sent me an email specifically stating that there was no need to cite any references suggested by the reviewers. This strengthened my determination and I chose to trust the editor, who did not let me down and made revisions on the same day.

Accepted on July 25, 2022.

The first reviewer provided very detailed feedback and was quite professional. After making the suggested revisions, the submission was directly accepted the next day.

The second reviewer took half a month and directly rejected the paper, with vague reasons and several low-level errors in their suggestions. It was either intentionally trying to upset people or not very knowledgeable in this area. Overall, the impression was not good, resulting in rejection.

Therefore, a third reviewer was sought, who completed the review in 3 days and provided a lot of feedback. They seemed very professional and had a sharp perspective. Although I added an experiment out of personal interest and casually wrote an article in this direction to complete the task, the reviewer was still friendly. After making further revisions, the paper was accepted the next day.

Within 3 days, the associate editor provided many suggestions on writing style and expression, which were minor changes. Afterwards, the paper was directly accepted.

In summary, the review process was strict, efficient, and the experience with the submission platform was excellent.