The editor can't find additional reviewers

Question

I received this message form the editor "Thanks for note. We have tried 11 potential reviewers to date and have one review at hand and another that is promised. We will be in touch once the second review is acquired". What this meant? May be he rejected the submission if can't find the second reviewer

Answer 1

You have two lines of text, and that's really all there is: You can try to parse tea leaves, but you will never know. So sit back and relax: the decision will ultimately come, whatever it may be.

To be more to the point, the editor really just says what is happening: They're having difficulty finding people willing to review the paper. One could come up with a number of reasons why that might be so, but you really don't know, and speculation isn't going to get you any closer to the truth. The only way you could find out why they have difficulty finding reviewers is to ask the editor, who may or may not want to talk about it. You could also suggest possible reviewers in a reply to the editor, which the editor may or may not want to consider.

In the end, you really can't know what is happening from just these two sentences, and it is unproductive to spend your brain power in coming up with possible scenarios.

Answer 2

It's just three sentences but it's quite revealing:

• They invited 11 reviewers
• At least two reviewers agreed to review the paper
• One of them has already submitted the review
• The other has a review due date that's sometime in the future, and the editor believes that the reviewer will actually submit a review

Your editor isn't having trouble finding reviewers - he/she has already acquired one review and another is promised.

On the other hand it's impossible to tell if your paper is going to be rejected, since after all it's impossible to tell what the contents of the review actually are. There's nothing to do except wait.