Why has finding reviewers become so hard?

Every journal editor knows this scene by heart: the article has cleared desk review, and it’s time to assign reviewers. Two suitable names are identified, invitations go out. A week of silence. One declines politely, the other never replies. New names, new invitations, new waiting… The clock keeps running, the author asks “what’s the status of my manuscript?”, and the editor ends up running not editing — their actual job — but a kind of invitation logistics.

This scene is not playing out at your journal alone. The data say the problem is global and structural.

Reviewer fatigue in numbers

Invitation acceptance rates have been falling for years. In long-run data from six ecology and evolution journals, the proportion of invitations that led to a completed review fell from 56% in 2003 to 37% in 2015. A more recent example: the journal PRiMER’s 2017-2025 invitation data show the acceptance rate dropping from a 2020 peak of 56% to 36% in 2024 — and, on top of that, the completion rate among those who accepted slipping from 89% to 76%.

The editor’s side of the ledger is laid out plainly in an editorial in Acta Odontologica Scandinavica: where inviting 2-3 reviewers per article sufficed in 2006-2010, the number rose to 6-7 in 2019-2024; sending invitations to more than 20 researchers to secure two reviewers is no longer out of the ordinary.

So are reviewers just being difficult? Quite the opposite — the load has genuinely grown. According to IOP Publishing’s 2024 study, half of researchers say review requests have increased over the past three years. And the scale of this labor is striking: a 2021 study estimates that the world’s reviewers spent more than 100 million hours — roughly 15,000 years — on reviews in 2020 alone. Unpaid, and mostly invisible, labor.

In short: yield per invitation is falling, load per reviewer is rising. The two curves point in opposite directions, and the gap is widening.

What’s in the editor’s hands: what can you change?

No single journal can reverse a global trend. But the territory under the editor’s control is larger than it looks — because if one layer of the problem is global fatigue, another layer is local process loss.

Know your pool. At most journals, the “reviewer pool” is really the editor’s memory plus a scattered list. Who reviews in which areas, how many active assignments do they have right now, how have they answered past invitations, how many days do they take on average? When this is on record, sending the right invitation on the first try becomes possible. Reviewer suggestions in Nasirus draw their strength from exactly this record; wearing down a reviewer who already has three pending assignments with a fourth works against both the reviewer and the process.

Remove the registration barrier. One of the invisible factors depressing acceptance is the “please register with our system to review” step. For someone outside the field or abroad, opening yet another account is a small but real barrier. Letting an external reviewer see the file and submit their report through a private secure link, without creating an account, takes that barrier to zero.

Automate the reminder and the plan B. Delay grows because nobody chases it. The polite reminder should go out on schedule by itself; when a reasonable window is exceeded, the assignment should time out automatically and a backup reviewer be suggested from the pool. The editor’s job at that point should be only to approve the suggested backup — not to chase.

Make the labor visible. Keeping reviewer performance on record — turnaround time, completed assignments — matters not only for process management but for gratitude. The list for the end-of-year thank-you letters to reviewers who have served the journal reliably should come out of the system as a report.

The underestimated power of the invitation itself

One more detail — cost zero, effect measurable: the invitation itself.

The bad invitation is familiar: “Review request” in the subject line, only the title of the work in the body, no clear deadline, and the file withheld with “we’ll send it if you accept.” The researcher receiving it has none of the information needed to decide — and faced with uncertainty, the easiest answer is silence.

A good invitation puts the decision-relevant information up front: the work’s abstract (in a form consistent with double-blind practice), the expected scope of the review, a time estimate (“we find a report typically takes 2-3 hours”), a clear deadline, and one-click accept/decline links. Making declining easy is deliberate design, too: a quick “no” is worth far more than three weeks of silence — the editor moves to the backup reviewer three weeks earlier.

Writing the invitation template carefully once and keeping it in the system means that same quality is preserved automatically in every invitation. It will not rescue your acceptance rate on its own; but a few points of improvement per invitation, at a journal sending hundreds of invitations a year, adds up to weeks.

Make chasing the system’s job

Whenever the reviewer crisis comes up, big ideas get floated as solutions: paying reviewers, career credit, mandates… These are debates for the publishing ecosystem at large, and reforms no individual editor can wait for.

What an editor can do today is more modest but measurably effective: increase the invitation’s precision, reduce the friction in front of acceptance, and take the chasing away from humans and give it to the system. It will not end the twenty-invitation marathons entirely; but on every article, it hands hours back to the editor and weeks back to the author.

Seeing your own journal’s invitation-acceptance-turnaround numbers — for most editors, for the first time — is eye-opening in itself. To see how the peer-review module keeps that scoreboard, book a demo.