APPLIED SOFT COMPUTING

16 Mar 22 Submission
07 May 22 Revise and Resubmit (No external review, AE directly asked for revision)
26 Jul 22 Under Review
1 Sep 22 Under Review (No response from reviewers, sent a reminder letter to AE)
4 Sep 22 Under Review (AE replied that reviewers have been reminded, and two reviewers came in)
14 Sep 22 Under Review (One reviewer completed the review)
19 Sep 22 Rejected (Rejected directly)
However, only feedback from one reviewer was provided, and the AE explicitly stated that the rejection was based on this reviewer's feedback: The reviewer mentioned that several punctuation marks should be periods. They also copied several paragraphs of my content (I thought it was their comments, but it turned out to be my own content. Couldn't they use ellipses for long paragraphs to show professionalism?), and they also mentioned that the text was too long and the images needed to be enlarged to be clearly visible (but I used vector images). They concluded that the technical quality was not satisfactory, so it was not suitable for publication.
Then the AE commented: I completely agree with the reviewer's viewpoint.
In just six months, my paper was rejected because of punctuation marks. Overall, I feel that this journal treats papers quite casually, and I have no idea where they found the reviewers and AE with such standards... LOL. No wonder it dropped from a top-tier to a second-tier journal. Anyway, I won't submit to it again...

Reviewer and editor using an unprofessional format to reject the manuscript is really quite unprofessional. However, based on my personal experience of submitting and reviewing manuscripts, in most cases where rejection is based on this reason, the title, abstract, and introduction have unclear logical descriptions of the research problem and methodology, which leads to significant confusion for the reviewer in the initial reading (this can be seen from the fact that your manuscript has not been accepted for over a month). Once there are also issues with formatting, the impression can be greatly diminished. Additionally, considering the annual publication volume of over 1000 articles in ASOC, editors have a basis for comparison when handling a large number of manuscripts. If the quality of the manuscripts they handle during the same period is generally high, it will greatly elevate their judgment standards. Therefore, do not think that publishing a paper is only a matter between you and the reviewer. My personal suggestion is to reorganize the logic of the front-end of the paper. As for the issue of images needing to be enlarged to be clear, if you change to ten different reviewers, five of them will still point it out.