Paper accepted by a journal without comments

This has happened to me twice. The first occurrence was for a paper that was accepted in a decent computational fluid mechanics journal with a single reviewer. The comments were purely aesthetics ( Color change to some figures, etc.). The second time was in a chemical engineering journal (also a pretty good one), and there were absolutely zero comments from the single reviewer that reviewed the paper.

Initially, I found these occurrence quite alarming because the papers had been accepted after significant delay (2-3 months at least), but had been reviewed by a single reviewer. With time, I think this is just a proof that the review process is by itself flawed, but there is little we can do as researcher except carry our own reviews with as much care as possible.

However, from a career point of view, no one knows how many reviewers actually reviewed your paper once it is published (except for some very specific journals). What I did, and maybe I can suggest you do the same, is to take extra care when you do the proof reading of the paper and the corrections. I would even ask some colleagues or at least your co-authors to help you as much during the proof reading.

I would be suspicious in that case. You may be a very good scientist, but I still think that no two readers would have exactly the same opinion about the paper (let alone two reviewers and the author). I am deeply dissatisfied with the review process as it is, since I get sometimes unreadable papers to review even from good journals. It is pure waste of my time. So I honestly cannot believe that two people would 1) read the paper 2) understand the paper 3) have an opinion about the paper and would have really nothing to add. It never happened to me as an author, and only once as reviewer, and in that case I wrote the positive aspects of the paper in the review (including "I have rarely a pleasure to review a paper which needs basically no revision"). So ... I would be suspicious, yes.

It happens with one of my earliest papers, which was very technical in establishing a close-form derivation of a statistical error, hence could not be much improved or modified. I took it in a positive mode! I would say it all depends on the paper and on the journal: some electronic journals aim at quick acceptance or rejection and ask referees to refrain from suggesting aesthetic modifications.