Truly astounding that your tool happened to appeal to 10 people who, collectively, have averaged publishing an expected 100 papers each using it over the past 4 years ;P.
It happens…. Great that the journal accepted in the end and it is doing well. I wrote about a similar experience a while ago…. Our paper now has over 900 citations!
As a reviewer, I _never_ comment on ”novelty and interest to a wide audience” negatively. In rare cases I may comment those positively. I only comment on data quality, statistics (if I can) and credibility of conclusions.
I conclude that at least 100,000 people have generated kmer plots from Illumina data — which is probably much closer to reality than the 1,000 people that reviewer #3 estimated 😃
Julius Marmur (!) once told me that when he submitted one of his classic papers on the relation btw G,C content and melting temperature, he got back a very nasty 13 page single spaced review
(kids, that is 13 pages hand typed )
I wish reviewers stop making editorial comments. Stick to your lane, review the paper and let the editor decide if the manuscript belongs in the journal or not.
Comments
https://geoffbarton.org/publishing-research-part-1
(kids, that is 13 pages hand typed )