Q: My paper was rejected with a comment that makes me doubt if the review was done. What action can I take?
I submitted a case report to an English medical journal published by a Japanese society which I belong to. I made an inquiry since there was no progress for more than 3 months after the status changed to “under review”. Then I got rejection with the following short comment:
Reviewers' comments:
Reviewer #1: Unfortunately, we cannot find the high priority of this manuscript for publication.
This manuscript cannot provide significant information to readers.
I doubt whether the review was actually done, but I submitted to another journal and got an acceptance after revision. If the review was actually performed at the former journal, would this comment be common? If there was any problem with this journal, which action should I have taken then?
As per the reviewer's comment, he/she did not find think that your paper has priority over others to be published in this journal. Basically what this means is that the journal prefers to publish other papers they have received as they feel those might have more novelty or may be more relevant for the journal's readership than yours. This usually happens when a journal has a high volume of submissions. Even if they have received some papers which are of good quality, they have to prioritize ones that are on more popular topics or have higher novelty, since they can publish only a limited number of articles in every issue.
Even if you feel that the review was not done in detail, there is not much you can do about it. Ultimately, it is the editor's decision whether or not to publish a paper and you will have to respect that decision.
Related reading:
This content belongs to the Conducting Research Stage