International Journal of Food Science and Technology
IJFST-2020-30451
Title: Distribution of Iron, Zinc and Manganese in milling streams of common wheat Serbian cultivars: Preliminary survey
Comments to authors:
Distribution of 3 elements, including Iron, Zinc and Manganese in milling fractions of common Serbian wheat cultivars were determined. However, the differences in minerals composition of grains from different wheat cultivars are well addressed in literature. Also, distribution of minerals in milling fractions of wheat and other cereals has been studied and well known. Therefore, the present study lacks novelty and the conclusion failed to add significant knowledge to the field. Some other comments could be listed as follows:
1) Detailed statistical method used in the study should be included in a separated section in methodologies.
2) Page 9, line 55, heading title should be justified to “Mineral composition of the whole grains”. Also, environmental, agricultural treatments, and other conditions contribute to the differences in mineral composition of grains from different wheat cultivars should be well discussed. Authors just commented on their results without discussions.
3) Page 10-13, authors used the word “very similar”, “similar”, or “as expected” several times, so if your findings are similar to findings of other studies, especially Guttieri et al. (2015), or can be well expected, why this study was done?. Differences in findings, milling conditions, and wheat cultivars in this study and previous studies should be well addressed and discussed.
4) Generally, discussion of the results is superficial, and several very old references are cited in the manuscript. Authors should do good literature review and well compare their results with findings of recent studies. Many similar studies have been carried on the same topic and available online.
5) Most of data are presented in Tables and Figures without statistical analysis. However, since the study mainly focused on differentiation of minerals in wheat cultivars and milling fractions, all the data should be statistically analyzed and presented as means ± standard deviation. Statistical differences should also be indicated and well addressed in the results discussion section.

Authors failed to revise their paper according to reviewers’ comments. Last time I asked authors to do statistical analysis and present data as means± standard deviations, and authors just included subscript letters in Tables and stated that "Different letters within row indicate significant difference at 0.05 probability level". However, when I looked at data within the same raw in Tables, I found that some data for different parameters and cannot be compared, and subscript letters are randomly distributed in wrong way in all Tables. This mean that authors are careless, or they do not understand how to do statistical analysis, or they did not perform analyses in replicates. Another important issue is that last time I asked authors to improve structure of the manuscript and discussions, but the manuscript is still too wordy, not well structured, and very difficult to follow and understand the message of the work. Many parts are ambiguous in methods and results sections, makes the readers do not understand what have been done, how, and why. Therefore, the manuscript has no merit for publication, and I strongly recommend rejection.