PHYTOMEDICINE

After submitting the manuscript, it was returned for revision three times. After a successful submission, I waited for a week and the editor changed from the chief editor to the associate editor. Then it was sent for review. After a month, I received the revision comments. There were a total of three reviewers, with two of them raising questions about the writing aspect and one reviewer asking why only iron death was studied and not apoptosis, giving me 20 days to make revisions. After carefully revising the article according to the feedback, I submitted the revised manuscript approximately three weeks later. I thought that such minor revisions would be accepted directly, but to my surprise, I had to wait for another week for it to be sent for review again. This time, only one reviewer agreed to review it. After waiting for two weeks, I received the review comments. The other two reviewers still did not agree to review it. So, I sent an email to inquire about the situation and it took another week for it to be back in the editor's hands. They invited a new reviewer. After receiving the feedback from this new reviewer (who pointed out the need for some additional experiments), I waited for approximately one week and received a rejection letter stating that the journal requires positive controls and concentration gradients for in vitro and in vivo experiments. I checked previous articles published by the journal and found that some of them did not include positive controls and concentration gradients. It is frustrating that after three rounds of external review, the manuscript was rejected for this reason.

Posted on 2022.4.25, received first-round comments on 2022.5.21, but due to work reasons, there was a delay. Revised the first round on 2022.6.29, second-round revision on 2022.7.4, and accepted on 2022.7.10. The process was quite fast (except for one reviewer who asked repeated questions...). There were six reviewers (possibly eight if invited?), and this journal has a feature where all manuscripts need to be reviewed by the editor-in-chief before being passed on to other relevant editors. There are many reviewers involved. Another thing about this journal is that even if one reviewer gives a rejection, if the overall opinion is for revisions, you still have the opportunity to respond to the reviewer who rejected your paper and convince them to change their decision to acceptance.