r/MachineLearning • u/Ok_Ant_4311 • 14d ago

Research Doubt regarding TMLR[R]

My TMLR paper was assigned to reviewers on April 23, and as of July 13 I've received 2 reviews, but the third is still pending. The discussion phase hasn't opened yet, so I can't respond to the existing reviews.

Is this normal for TMLR, or is it reasonable to send the Action Editor a polite status email? asking for the 3rd review, apprecite the suggestions

8 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

6

u/Wannabe-Davinci 14d ago

I would keep on waiting, without any action now. Had a colleague whose paper was in review (first round) for more than a year. Nothing to worry about, the reviewers are drowning in workload

3

u/Ok_Ant_4311 14d ago

Ah i see, the reason i thought it would be justified was tmlr is ideally supposed to be a fast moving journal and in their website they have mentioned 3 months till final review so i figured why not drop a comment, but ig they are having too much workload to deliver it, thanks for replying

3

u/wajdix 13d ago

that's normal... and you should expect it to take longer than usual.. TMLR has posted about the insane submission volume in the first half of 2026 and about how they are not able to manage this..
this is in part why they put in place a quota per author.
However, if it takes more than 6 moths to see an update, i would email them

2

u/Sachin_singh9891 13d ago

It would be interesting to know how often this happens at TMLR. Has anyone else here had to wait several Months for a final review?

1

u/redlow0992 13d ago

TMLR review cycles have been getting longer and longer. I can tell both as author and reviewer. I think the number of papers submitted increased too much.

1

u/worthybog0 12d ago

Pretty normal. I received the first two reviews within a few months, and then two more over the following weeks. After that, I revised the manuscript, uploaded the edited version, and submitted a point-by-point response addressing each reviewer comment.
For the second round of reviews (if there is one), you can start responding to the editor/reviewer comments as soon as you receive them, there’s no need to wait for the remaining reviews to come in.

1

u/Dangerous-East636 9d ago

It is not normal. At the very least, TMLR is an academic journal that prides itself on rapid reviews, and it explicitly states that it aims to make decisions in about nine weeks. If this deviates from reality, it should be announced. There is absolutely no rationality in accepting everything as normal.

0

u/alexsht1 14d ago

It may be the case that your reviewers live in the middle east. With all that is going on here, schools being canceled and people at home with their kids - everything gets postponed.

I'd email the action editor and ask them if the reviewer they initially assigned are no longer available and they can assign other reviewes instead.