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So far, that is the only information given to me by the journal. I have no idea if all 18 reviewers were invited at the same time, or if one at a time. In either cause, is this a bad sign, something like a looming possibility that the editor might eventually reject my manuscript if they can't find any reviewer to go thru my work?

Liberty Payumo
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    18 looks like a lot of reviewers to me. – Dmitry Savostyanov Jul 01 '20 at 15:21
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    Some journals use an "accept first" approach, were a bunch of reviewers are invited. The invitation is then terminated after the first pre-defined "X" number of reviewers to accept the invitation. – The Guy Jul 01 '20 at 15:48
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    The information is completely useless. It could be that some of the 18 have declined, for whatever reasons - we don't know. I would take it as a bad quality indicator for the journal that they give you such useless information. – lighthouse keeper Jul 01 '20 at 21:35

3 Answers3

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It is difficult to give an informative answer without knowing the culture of the journal to which you submitted. In the journals where I am an editorial board member, 18 would be a high number to get the number of reviews necessary for a decision (often 3).

A couple of reasons to be pessimistic:

  1. It could be that your manuscript is being handled by an associate editor (AE) who likes to fire off a huge number of review invitations routinely, in which case I would suspect that this AE does not work hard to find good expertise matches.
  2. It could be that the information from which the potential reviewer has to decided whether to accept the invitation (author list (unless double blind), title, abstract (usually)) is not enticing the reviewers to accept. If this is true, you could try to take this as constructive feedback that your title and abstract should make someone want to read your manuscript.

On the optimistic side, I do not think that having a large number of reviewers invited is particularly bad news for the ultimate acceptance of your manuscript. Best of luck.

Vivek Goyal
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    Thanks for your answer. I just logged in my account... it is now up to "23 reviewers invited." Other than that information, I'm pretty much in the dark. Hard to say how may reviewers have accepted at this point. I just hope the journal does not make an outright rejection because no reviewers would accept my manuscript for review. – Liberty Payumo Jul 08 '20 at 16:24
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You will be lucky if you get 18 reviews! It can be good, especially if you have nefarious/incompetent reviewers in the mix. If your paper is good, most competent reviewers would acknowledge that in their review; this also helps the editor if many reviewers provide the same comments. In contrast, if you have two reviewers, with opposing views, it is harder for the editor to judge; is it a bad paper or just a bad reviewer?

Prof. Santa Claus
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Without knowing the specifics (which would force you to identify the journal, which you should not do) it is hard to tell. When I was AE in Computer Science, it was very hard to get good reviewers. It used to be that some senior people would farm out reviews to their students, and if they checked the work of their students, then this would be fine, but this practice is now frowned upon. Now, senior people at the peak of their career are too busy to accept review requests unless they are for very specific conferences or highly prestigious journals. Those beyond their peak are slowing down and doing less community work and are even less likely to accept review requests. This leaves junior people, often selected because of their related thesis work. If they published as students, they have moved on and their email is no longer valid. If they moved to industry, they often do not get any rewards for doing reviews, even though they might be actively publishing. If they moved to a university, they feel overwhelmed. The result is that review invitations are often unanswered. You might have noticed that there are now efforts to at least get credit for doing reviews.

So, most journals have a hard time finding reviewers, while pressuring AEs to find them fast and not re-use them. They also do not want any connections between the reviewer and the AE and the reviewer should not be an AE.

Trying to answer your question: 18 reviewers is a large number, but: an AE might be inviting batches of people at a time that the AE does not personally know and expecting that maybe 35% will actually receive the invitation and of these, the majority will not accept. I am assuming a competent AE that has matched your article with reviewers based on the prospective reviewer's previous publications, but otherwise unknown to the reviewer.

There is at least one editor that use a system where the editor or editorial assistant seems to just randomly ask people that have reviewed for the editor before. I get review invitation to review articles in fields that I only know from wikipedia. That would be another way to get very large number of reviewers invited.

Thomas Schwarz
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