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Peer Review Delays: Why Does the Process Move So Slow?

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Ask any academic, and you’ll likely get the same groan followed by a long, exasperated sigh: “Why is peer review so slow?” It’s the bane of scholars everywhere. Months—sometimes over a year—can pass before a submitted paper is accepted, rejected, or worse, still floating in limbo. For early-career researchers on the brink of job applications or tenure reviews, this isn’t just inconvenient—it’s terrifying.

Despite technological advances that have made submitting a paper as simple as uploading a selfie, the peer review process seems stuck in slow motion. This is not entirely due to inefficiency or laziness. The reasons are far more intricate and systemic. Peer review is the backbone of scholarly communication, but it’s buckling under the weight of its own contradictions. Here, we dive deep into the academic abyss to uncover the reasons for peer review delays, and whether the process can—or even should—be fixed.

The Academic Ecosystem: A Volunteer-Based System

To understand the sluggish nature of peer review, start by realizing that it operates on unpaid labor. Peer reviewers are not compensated, which means they are typically full-time academics reviewing papers out of professional obligation, goodwill, or fear of social backlash—not financial motivation. This often puts reviewing on the back burner, squeezed between teaching, grant writing, administrative meetings, and their own research.

It’s not just reviewers. Editors are also often unpaid or modestly compensated. Many juggle their editorial responsibilities alongside their day jobs. They must invite reviewers, nudge those who ghost, and make judgment calls when reviews contradict one another. It’s a time-consuming dance. With little institutional support and zero monetary incentive, editorial work becomes a slow-burning side project, not a front-burner priority.

The unpaid nature of peer review reflects a broader academic ethos—knowledge as a public good, contribution as a noble duty. But idealism doesn’t keep inboxes empty. When your entire system is built on “free labor,” delays aren’t a glitch—they’re a feature.

Too Few Reviewers, Too Many Papers

The volume of manuscripts submitted to journals has exploded over the past two decades. The “publish or perish” mentality has taken firm root across disciplines. More academics, more pressure to publish, more journals—welcome to the deluge.

Meanwhile, the pool of willing and qualified reviewers hasn’t grown proportionally. Academics are now frequently inundated with requests to review, and many have started declining most of them. Some simply don’t respond at all, leaving editors scrambling to find replacements. One study found that editors often need to send 10 or more invitations to get just two reviewers to accept.

This mismatch—between demand for review and supply of reviewers—is perhaps the most direct cause of delay. But it’s not just a numbers game. Some fields are so specialized that only a handful of scholars are capable of offering a useful critique. Those scholars tend to be overburdened with requests, making them even more likely to decline.

The net result? Your paper might sit in a journal’s inbox for weeks—or even months—before it gets sent out for review at all. And that’s before the first reader even opens the file.

Reviewer Fatigue and Burnout

Reviewing a manuscript isn’t a light lift. It requires time, critical reading, background checking, ethical scrutiny, and the crafting of constructive feedback. Multiply that by a handful of requests each month, and it becomes overwhelming fast.

Academics suffer from what is now referred to as “reviewer fatigue.” The system assumes an infinite well of altruism, but when that well runs dry—as it has in many disciplines—the entire model sputters.

The irony? Those who submit papers are often the same people declining to review others’. It’s a circular hypocrisy, but one that’s increasingly normalized.

Burnout has become endemic in academia. Between shrinking research budgets, growing administrative demands, and unrelenting pressure to publish, reviewers have precious little time left to engage deeply with other people’s work. And unlike teaching or publishing, reviewing doesn’t come with clear metrics or measurable rewards. It’s invisible labor.

The Editor’s Desk: Bureaucracy and Bottlenecks

Let’s not forget the editors. Even after reviewers submit their evaluations, the editor has to read the reviews, possibly adjudicate conflicts, and make a decision. In many cases, the reviews themselves are contradictory—one recommends rejection, the other an enthusiastic acceptance. The editor is now in the awkward position of playing referee, a task that isn’t always swift.

Editorial boards, especially at top-tier journals, often meet periodically to make collective decisions. If your paper lands in their inbox a week after such a meeting, congratulations—you’re waiting another month, minimum.

Some journals try to speed things up by implementing desk rejections. While this removes weak papers early on, it doesn’t do much to help the bottleneck for those that survive the first cut. Even automated workflows and editorial management systems don’t eliminate human indecision or delay. Editors are also people—capable of procrastination, swamped inboxes, and academic guilt.

Round After Round: The Revision Saga

Even once your paper passes the initial review, you’re not out of the woods. Rarely is a paper accepted without revisions. Most go through one or two rounds of “minor” or “major” revisions, which ironically can take longer than the initial submission.

Now the paper bounces back to the authors for rewriting, then back to the reviewers (if they agree to review the revision at all), and the cycle continues. Each round reintroduces all the delays that plagued the initial submission—slow responses, backlog, and scheduling conflicts.

In some fields, it’s not uncommon for manuscripts to undergo three, four, or even five rounds of revision before a final decision is made. Each round adds weeks—sometimes months—to the timeline. And sometimes, after two rounds of revisions and months of effort, the paper is still rejected. Yes, it’s brutal.

Some journals exacerbate this by failing to impose clear deadlines for reviewers or authors. The absence of hard timelines enables further procrastination, reinforcing the culture of delay.

Journals Don’t Prioritize Speed—And Sometimes They Shouldn’t

Here’s a controversial point: Maybe speed isn’t always the goal.

Academic publishing isn’t TikTok. Thoughtful peer review, while slow, can catch flawed arguments, unethical methods, or even fraudulent data. Rushing that process could erode trust in the literature. Some disciplines—particularly medicine or public policy—need rigorous scrutiny, not just rapid dissemination.

But let’s be clear: there’s a difference between thoroughness and dysfunction. Deliberate, rigorous review is valuable. But a manuscript lingering in editorial limbo for nine months with zero updates? That’s not diligence—that’s negligence.

Speed isn’t inherently bad. Faster review doesn’t have to mean superficial review. With better processes, clearer expectations, and modern tools, peer review could be both swift and serious.

The Role of Institutional Incentives

The academic reward system also deserves blame. Universities value publications far more than peer review or editorial work. Reviewers can list reviews on Publons or ORCID, but this doesn’t count toward promotions or grants in most systems.

Why volunteer for no credit when publishing your work earns you grants, promotions, and prestige?

It will remain an underappreciated task until reviewing is institutionally recognized and rewarded, easily postponed or ignored altogether. In effect, the labor that maintains the integrity of the scholarly record is invisible in the eyes of the systems that govern academic careers.

A few institutions and funders have started recognizing review activity as a form of academic contribution. But until this becomes the norm—and not the exception—change will be incremental at best.

Technological Inefficiencies

Despite being a digital-first process, peer review’s infrastructure is clunky at best. Submission systems are outdated, user-unfriendly, and offer poor communication tools.

Reminders are manual, review templates vary wildly, and there is little automation to help editors track progress efficiently. Even with AI entering the publishing world, few journals are using it to streamline reviewer matching or flag missing reviews.

In short, the workflow hasn’t caught up to the 21st century. Journal platforms often resemble legacy enterprise systems from the early 2000s. They’re slow, ugly, and brittle. And because academic publishing is a low-competition industry, there’s little incentive to innovate.

Imagine if manuscript tracking systems worked like real project management tools. Imagine if AI could flag potential conflicts of interest, suggest reviewers, or even assess the readability of a manuscript before it’s sent out. The tech exists—it just hasn’t been adopted.

Language Barriers and International Submissions

As publishing becomes more global, journals receive record numbers of submissions from non-native English speakers. This adds another layer to the peer review process: language editing, comprehension issues, and longer review cycles.

Some reviewers spend extra time trying to understand poorly written manuscripts or reject them outright, citing “language issues.” This dynamic introduces bias and adds delay, especially in fields where multilingual equity is still a dream.

Journals also vary widely in their willingness to help international authors improve their submissions. Some offer language editing services or allow minor grammar revisions; others reject outright without flexibility. This inconsistent treatment further strains the system.

Solutions That (Sometimes) Work

Some journals have started offering incentives: discounts on APCs (article processing charges), reviewer recognition programs, or even money (though still rare). These can help, but they don’t fix the root problem—the lack of structural value placed on reviewing.

Innovative peer review models, such as portable peer review, where reviews follow a manuscript between journals, or open peer review, where identities and comments are transparent, have gained traction. Platforms like Peer Community In and Review Commons experiment with pre-journal reviews.

And then there’s preprints, which bypass peer review entirely for faster dissemination—though not always without controversy. In fast-moving fields like epidemiology or climate science, preprints provide rapid visibility. But they don’t replace peer review—they just delay it until after public exposure.

Still, even these solutions remain peripheral. The mainstream peer review system is a sluggish, aging beast. And academia, being academia, resists change with the ferocity of a stubborn mule. Until there’s a paradigm shift in how review labor is valued and how journal workflows are designed, the status quo will endure.

Conclusion

So, what causes the peer review delays? The process itself. Peer review is designed that way. It’s underfunded, undervalued, and overloaded. It relies on unpaid, overworked experts to review an ever-growing flood of submissions, without proper recognition or support. Add in editorial bottlenecks, outdated tech, language challenges, and the inertia of academic tradition, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for delay.

Fixing peer review won’t be quick or easy. But understanding the problem is the first step. Until academia begins rewarding peer reviewers the way it rewards authorship, delays will persist. For now, maybe the best we can do is manage expectations—and bring a book (or two) while we wait. Or, better yet, start advocating for a better system. Because this one? It’s had a good run but is due for an overhaul.

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