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Five challenging peer-review situations, and what to do about them

Posted 6/24/2025

Writing a publishable paper is hard enough without being held hostage. Publishing is important for advancing your career, naturally creating high stakes for manuscript review decisions. Furthermore, the system can incentivize the journal and anonymous reviewers to behave in ways that hinder your goal of publishing the best possible work.

When you face a confusing or frustrating situation, you may be tempted to do whatever it takes to get your paper accepted. But you often have more agency than you realize, and there's usually a path forward that lets you improve and publish your work without rewarding bad behavior.

Five common situations are described below, along with response strategies.

You submitted your paper several months ago, and haven’t gotten reviews back.

What is happening: The review process is full of document hand-offs and input from volunteers who have higher priorities. The editor may have been delayed in finding reviewers for your paper. Or they may have recruited reviewers but are now stuck waiting for a tardy review. Waiting two or three months for reviews is not uncommon, but long waits deserve some intervention.

What you should do: It is fair to inquire about the status of a paper you submitted three or four months ago, and to follow up monthly after that. It is almost certainly because a reviewer is late in providing a review, and the editor may or may not have been aware of this. The editor can prod the reviewer or make a decision without the late review. If you do inquire, explain why you are sensitive to the time (e.g., you are graduating soon or are on the job market, and the paper decision would help your CV). As an editor myself, I pay special attention to students and authors with deadlines.

A template inquiry:

Dear Editor,

I am writing you regarding manuscript # XXX. I submitted this manuscript on [date], and [X months] have passed since submission. I'm applying for academic positions this fall, so a status update would help me accurately represent this work on my CV. Thank you for any update you can provide.

Sincerely,

[Signature]

An anonymous reviewer asks you to cite several papers by the same author

What is happening: The suggestions might be relevant work by a seminar author that you missed. But if the references are not relevant, the reviewer has probably asked you to cite their own work. Reviewers sometimes exploit their anonymity because citations to their work will advance their own career. This “coercive citation” behavior is, on occasion, truly extreme.

What you should do: If the suggestions are unrelated, send a private message to the editor expressing your confusion and asking for clarification as to whether you are required to comply with the request. A good editor should screen out coercive citation requests before sending feedback to the authors. But perhaps the editor didn’t notice the problem when scanning the reviews. If they realize the request was coercive, they should tell you “don’t worry about it.” Or they may judge that the request was credible, in which case you should try to accommodate it.

If you can’t get clear feedback from the editor, think hard about whether the paper can be improved with more citations and respond politely. If the suggested suggestions are not relevant, add alternate citations instead so that you are responsive to the general request for more literature review without complying with the extortion attempt.

A template response:

We reviewed the suggested papers but found limited connections between their focus and our work on [your topic]. However, we expanded our literature review and added citations to related work in [specific area] to address the review comment regarding the literature review.

The editor makes a generic request to cite recent papers from the journal

What is happening: I’ve twice seen a request of “please strengthen the literature review with recent publications from [this journal].” These editors are playing games to artificially inflate their journal’s Impact Factor, which measures how often recent papers in the journal get cited. They are taking advantage of an implicit threat that your paper’s acceptance depends on you complying.

What you should do: Here, you don’t have the option of appealing to the editor. The easiest solution is to cite a few additional topically relevant papers from other journals, and reply “we looked carefully for additional recent relevant literature and added these citations…” You don’t even need to acknowledge that the papers are not from the journal you are submitting to. The editor is probably making the same generic request for every submitted paper, so you also don’t need to feel like a spotlight is on you specifically. The editor hopes that enough people will comply to boost their Impact Factor a bit, but they can only be so blatant in playing games, so a “polite partial response” strategy shouldn’t produce a second request or put you at risk of rejection.

In the longer term, avoid journals that do this, as they are demonstrating that they value metrics more than honest scholarship. There are two journals in my field with high Impact Factors but a reputation for manipulation, and I avoid them like the plague. Also ask your institution to pay less attention to Impact Factors in hiring and promotion decisions, to disincentivize this behavior (and because the metric is not informative of an individual manuscript's quality even when it's not being manipulated).

A reviewer says “the literature review is insufficient,” but doesn’t offer specific guidance

What is happening: This challenging comment arises in several situations. The reviewer may have some specific literature in mind, but chose not to mention it. Perhaps it is their own work but they don’t want to suggest it and look coercive. Perhaps they are annoyed that you missed important prior work and want you to do the work of finding it. Or perhaps they are being lazy, because this review comment looks relevant but doesn’t require any work to identify what is actually missing. The reviewer should have been more specific, but you can’t control that.

What you should do: You should probably expand your literature review and document your changes. Do some additional searching and reading. Share your paper with some colleagues to see if they can identify what might be missing. Then do your best in adding a few more citations to related prior work. The reviewers will likely be satisfied, or else will have the opportunity to clarify.

A template response:

We did our best in expanding the literature review given the provided guidance. If there is specific additional work the reviewer believes is missing, we would appreciate any specific suggestions.

A reviewer says “the manuscript is too long and should be shortened.” 

What is happening: This is difficult to hear as an author, since the paper would already be shorter if you agreed. However, I am often sympathetic to reviewers in this case, especially when they point out specific areas that can be shortened. Authors tend to describe every aspect of their work, while readers want a more focused document that doesn’t obscure the main contribution.

What you should do: Take the reviewer feedback to heart. Start with specific guidance from the reviewer. Then consider whether there are parts of the paper that are “interesting, but irrelevant” to the paper’s main conclusions. Give your paper to a colleague and ask them if they see parts of the paper that could be removed or tightened up without compromising the contributions. With these strategies, you will often find good opportunities to shorten and improve the document.

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While you might feel like a hostage when desperate to publish, approach these situations as a negotiator. If the journal wants your paper, you have leverage to discuss the conditions for publication. Ask for clarifications and offer partial responses, while keeping in mind that confusing requests may be valid in some cases. Get feedback from trusted colleagues if you think you are being treated unfairly. And if things are truly going badly you can always withdraw your paper or resolve to never deal with a particular journal in the future.