View from the editor's desk | The quest of finding reviewers
Should journals stop looking for reviewers after too many declines?
By Pedro Peres-Neto
Concordia University, Canada
Editor-in-Chief, Oikos
The gist
Some journals reject manuscripts after a certain number of reviewers decline an invitation, arguing that if nobody is willing to review the paper, then perhaps the manuscript is not suitable for publication. I don’t think that is the right conclusion. Difficulty finding reviewers says much more about the current state of peer review than about the quality of a manuscript. Reviewer availability fluctuates throughout the year, some topics have particularly small research communities, and editors often compete for the same experts. Rather than rejecting manuscripts because reviewer invitations fail, journals should continue searching while asking authors to provide a broader and more thoughtful list of potential reviewers.
The longer answer
Every editor has experienced it.
You send out a few reviewer invitations. Declined.
You send a few more. Declined again.
Someone is travelling. Someone is on parental leave. Someone is overwhelmed with teaching. Someone simply doesn’t respond. Before long you’ve invited ten or fifteen reviewers and you’re still waiting for the first acceptance.
At that point, a natural question arises: should there be a limit? Should journals simply conclude that if enough reviewers decline, then the manuscript should be rejected?
I don’t think so.
This post is motivated by conversations I’ve had with editors across several journals over the years. The question comes up surprisingly often, particularly as reviewer fatigue has become a recurring concern. As with my previous posts, these are my personal views based on editorial experience rather than an official position of Oikos. That said, at Oikos we do not reject manuscripts simply because we have reached an arbitrary number of reviewer declines. We continue our efforts to identify suitable reviewers, often with input from the authors, because we believe that difficulties in securing reviewers are generally a reflection of the realities of modern peer review rather than an indication of the scientific quality or suitability of a manuscript.
The first thing to recognize is that reviewer availability is an extremely noisy signal. It reflects many things, but manuscript quality is usually not one of them. Some topics naturally have very small communities. In highly specialized areas, there may only be a few dozen researchers worldwide with the appropriate expertise, and many of them are collaborators, competitors, former students, recent co-authors, or otherwise conflicted. The pool shrinks remarkably quickly.
Timing matters as well.
Editors quickly learn that certain periods of the year are simply harder than others. Summer holidays in the Northern Hemisphere, the weeks leading to major conferences, the beginning and end of university semesters, examination periods, and holiday seasons can all make reviewer recruitment substantially more difficult. A manuscript submitted in July may face a very different reviewer landscape than an otherwise identical manuscript submitted in October.
None of this says anything about whether the science is good.
Another important point is that editors are not recruiting reviewers in isolation. The same relatively small group of active researchers is often being invited simultaneously by multiple journals. A reviewer declining an invitation from one journal may simply have accepted three others that same week.
From the author’s perspective, rejecting a manuscript because reviewers declined can also feel fundamentally unfair. Authors have no control over when experts are on vacation, how many invitations they receive from other journals, or whether someone has decided to take a temporary break from reviewing. Nor do they have any control over the reviewer-search strategies employed by individual editors. Some editors have larger professional networks, use different search tools, or simply invest more time and creativity in identifying potential reviewers than others. As a result, two otherwise identical manuscripts could receive different outcomes simply because one editor was more successful at recruiting reviewers. A decision based primarily on reviewer availability therefore risks confusing logistical difficulties (and even differences in editorial practice) with scientific merit.
Of course, this doesn’t mean editors should search indefinitely.
There are practical limits. Editors have limited time, authors deserve timely decisions, and journals cannot spend months searching for reviewers without making progress. But if a manuscript is rejected because reviewers could not be secured, that should be viewed as a failure of the review process and not as evidence that the manuscript itself lacked sufficient quality to be considered.
There is, however, one group that can meaningfully help: the authors.
Many submissions arrive with only two or three suggested reviewers, and occasionally with none at all. For highly specialized topics, this often isn’t enough. Authors usually know the active researchers in their field better than editors do. Providing a broader list around ten or emore carefully selected, qualified, and independent potential reviewers can make an enormous difference.
The emphasis, however, should be on carefully selected.
The goal is not simply to produce a long list of names. Suggested reviewers should collectively represent different institutions, countries, perspectives, and areas of expertise, while avoiding obvious conflicts of interest. A thoughtful list increases the chances that editors can quickly identify suitable reviewers without relying exclusively on the same small network that every journal is already contacting.
Editors, of course, remain entirely free to use or ignore those suggestions. Reviewer selection must always remain an editorial decision.
So where do we go from here?
I would hesitate to support policies that automatically reject manuscripts after a predetermined number of reviewer declines. Such rules are simple to administer, but they risk sending the wrong message. Reviewer availability is an imperfect and often misleading indicator.
A more constructive approach is to recognize reviewer recruitment as a shared responsibility. Editors should continue searching using the widest possible networks. Authors should help by providing extensive, diverse, and well-considered reviewer suggestions. Journals should also recognize that reviewer recruitment naturally varies across disciplines and throughout the calendar year.
Peer review is already challenging enough. We shouldn’t make manuscripts fail simply because editors happen to be looking for reviewers during the wrong week of the year.
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