When to withdraw a paper?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I've had a paper with a journal that has not been able to secure external reviewers for almost four months now.

I know everyone has different tolerances for review times given their career stage, but I'm wondering if there is a general time threshold at which most people should just rescind the paper. I'm also worried this means this journal will simply never find such external reviewers.

We discussed this not too long ago here, but I wonder what people think about this particular kind of case (where it looks like a journal hasn't even been able to find reviewers after four months).

What do you all think?

Comments

[just me, man]

I would be cautious about reading too much into what is listed on the Editorial Manger systems. Different journals use them and update them differently. So, unless you have contacted the editor and they said they have not yet found reviewers for your paper, then you should not assume that they have not found reviewers. Further, if authors are finding that editors cannot find reviewers after many many months, they should reflect on what they are writing on.

[Michel]

I've never done it, but I'd certainly be considering it after four months. Have you offered them a list of people to try?

[worth considering]

Agree with @just me, man, in that in my experience, the portals do not always match the actual status. I've had papers accepted that were never listed as anything other than "awaiting editor review" (or some such) on the portal. So asking the editor is worth considering.

Purely anecdotally, my personal threshold is eight months. At that point, I start pestering the editor. That's way too long, of course, but some journals (including good ones) just seem to work that way.

[OP]

I'm OP, and yes, I have contacted the managing editor. They have not managed to find anyone.

[OP]

@just me, man

Could you clarify your last comment? You said: "if authors are finding that editors cannot find reviewers after many many months, they should reflect on what they are writing on."

I'm a bit confused. This seems to imply the submission is not very good. But if that's true (which it may very well be!), why didn't the editor simply desk-reject?

[Hermias]

“if authors are finding that editors cannot find reviewers after many many months, they should reflect on what they are writing on”

I assume that this meant “your writing is too advanced for this Kali Yuga, pierce further into the secret things my friend”

[Early career]

Will emailing (soliciting a response about a longstanding review) be more likely to trigger a rejection? I feel I'd seen a post about this on TPC, but it slipped by, and now I can't find it.

[Postdoc]

FWIW, I've only pulled a paper because a journal couldn't find a reviewer once. It had taken them seven months to find one, but nope...

However, the paper did get accepted at a better journal later on. Sure, this is just one data point - but it's enough to make me very cautious about the suggestion that it's article quality that makes it hard for journals to find reviewers. Often it just takes forever until something gets accepted.

[Tim]

I think a relevant question is whether or not the journal is slow at getting reviewers, for whatever reason. For instance, if your topic is very niche, it might be that you'll have a long review no matter what journal it goes to. So withdrawing it and resubmitting somewhere else won't help. You might ask around to see if the particular journal is known to be slow or not.

Re contacting the journal, most journals have statistics on this own websites about how long reviews take and how quickly verdicts are rendered. I always cite those who emailing editors.

[just me, man]

OP
The reason I said you might want to consider what you are writing about is as follows. The only cases I know where journals have had a very hard time getting reviewers is when the paper is on a very topic not on anyone's radar. Indeed, besides research quality, journals do care about interest from their readers. (this is most obvious with Science and Nature, of course). So at one point the journal editor is inclined to give up.

[OP]

@just me, man

I suppose you'll just have to take my word for it, but the topic is a pretty popular one. My treatment of it may not be very good or interesting, but the topic itself is pretty widely discussed.

[Noah]

FWIW in my experience 4 months is not at all long to see no updates on the submission system. I wouldn't even think about pestering the editors until 6+ months.

[Prof L]

I wonder how many details the editor provides. Sometimes I'll decline to review a paper because it looks bad. Sometimes I can open the paper and glance over it, but usually it's just the abstract. Frequently, I'll think "This is bad writing and an implausible thesis" and I'll decline because (frankly) it's a pain in the ass to review a bad paper.

I'm not saying this is the case with OP (how would I know?) but a paper that has a hard time finding reviewers on a popular topic might have that problem. If that's the case, maybe working on the abstract might help. On the other hand, the editor may simply not know the right people, or hasn't worked very hard at finding someone.