A criticism from a reviewer in a recent rejected paper:
“it sounds rare to have so few people doing any work in that direction…”
So, if you try to publish a paper on a topic everybody is working on is fine but if you try to start a new research line that very few have so far targeted then you become suspicious?
Got the message, I’ll be more “conservative” next time.
I know the feeling. The best worst review my own stuff ever got was a single sentence: “I don’t like the title of the paper and I don’t like the author’s tone.” On that alone, a journal paper was rejected.