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Why do journals take months for desk-rejections without comments?

In our newest “how can we help you?” thread, a couple of readers asked why philosophy journals can take months to desk-reject manuscripts without providing any feedback to authors. One reader asks:

Why do journals desk-reject papers after a long time (more than two months)? I got desk rejections from two journals without comments. I know there’s probably nothing I can do about it, but it would be some consolation to understand the reasons behind this practice.

And another:

Similar Query: I’ve recently got a desk-rejection from Nous after almost 3 months, with no comments, and I’ve heard countless stories about desk-rejection taking upward of 2 months at PPR. What could possibly be the reason for this? Is it because papers at these journals go through a round of screening by the editor-in-chief and then another round by an associate editor? Or it’s because they employ a model where desk-rejections are outsourced to external referees, but who are not asked for comments?

Does anyone have helpful insights to share?

Posted in ,

23 responses to “Why do journals take months for desk-rejections without comments?”

  1. Anonymous

    If it’s a generalist journal it is usually because the area editor doesn’t like the paper after having had a quick look at it, or it is out of the scope of the journal, or other reasons similar to these.

    It can take a while because of a combination of the volume of submissions that are sent to the journal and the fact that academics are very, very busy people in general.

    Reply
  2. Anonymous

    I strongly echo this question, particularly regarding PPR and Noûs, which routinely seem to take upward of two months just to issue a desk rejection.

    For those of us still trying to secure a permanent position in an increasingly cutthroat job market, publications in these top-tier venues are make-or-break. Because the stakes are so high, early-career researchers are naturally sending their absolute best, most polished work to these specific journals.

    However, tying up a manuscript for over two months only to issue a desk rejection—without a single word of feedback—is actively harmful to our timelines. When you are on the precarious market, losing a quarter of a year just to be told “no” by the editorial desk burns through a massive portion of the job application cycle. It would be highly beneficial to the discipline to understand why this administrative delay is the standard practice, given how much it costs those of us at the most vulnerable career stages.

    Reply
  3. Michel

    I imagine it’s because they get a lot of submissions, and so nobody has the time to read them as they come in. They probably reserve a research period or two at the end of the month and do as much as they can, then tackle the rest at the same time the next month

    Reply
  4. Anonymous

    I have similar experiences at some of the top journals. My guess is that they are just poorly run.
    It should be possible to cut the time to decision, especially for desk rejections. Ethics, for instance, is much quicker after the recent change in management.

    Reply
  5. Anonymous

    Just wanted to chime in that I got a desk rejection at PPR after 8 months! Any justification of people “just being busy” surely falls apart at that point.

    Reply
  6. Chris

    It’s been a while since I’ve referred for Nous, but from what I recall they had implemented a refereed “desk rejection” where a paper is first sent to a reviewer who is supposed to make a quick decision about whether the manuscript is good enough to referee more fully. The hope is I think was that these decisions would be made in around on a week or 10 days. But it sounds like this system is just adding to the time to desk rejection if the initial referees are taking too long or they’re having trouble finding referees. They rarely publish in my subfield and have no one on the editorial board in it. Maybe the editors get too many manuscripts or too many outside their areas to desk reject themselves? I dunno.

    Reply
  7. Anonymous

    I have published in Nous in the past, but I will speak from my perspective as a referee. More and more journals are giving the instructions that we (referees) do not need to give comments if it is a quick and obvious rejection. But to get to that stage, two or three months can easily pass. The editor has to assign it to an area editor, who then has to invite referees, who then have to read the paper. And once they send their assessment back (even if it is just Reject), the editor has to process it and then send the rejection on to the author.
    I referee a lot. I do not like this system of sending something back with no comments. But there really are far too many people sending in work that falls far below professional standards. Indeed, I have pushed back at editors for asking me to referee papers that never should have been sent out.
    Many people do a very inadequate job of discussing the relevant literature. In some cases it as as if only a few people have written on the topic, when in fact many have. I suspect some of these papers are just course papers sent out in haste because a professor gave the paper a good grade.

    Reply
  8. Sam Elgin

    I completely sympathize with the frustration people experience with the publication process. Early-career scholars are especially vulnerable to bad luck and delays that are increasingly normal. Perhaps I’ve just become numb (at the very least, my expectations have been updated based on personal experience) – but I don’t think that a 2-3 month wait for a desk rejection is particularly unusual for philosophy journals, even outside of venues like Nous and PPR. The Journal of Philosophy, for example, sometimes desk-rejects papers as long as six months after they were originally submitted.

    I think that the main reason response times are so slow is that journals are overwhelmed with submissions. There are just a lot more papers for them to get to than there used to be. Previously, submissions to journals like Nous and PPR were almost exclusively from already-established philosophers in the US and the UK. Now, more and more graduate students submit in order to be competitive in the job market – and there are more international submissions than ever. That increased number of submissions results in a backlog, and means that editors take more time to get to the papers that they have. Even if your paper isn’t particularly long, if an editor has 100 other submissions to get through first (in addition to their own research, teaching responsibilities, departmental service, etc.) it’s going to take some time before they can read it.

    An obvious solution is to hire more editors – but that’s not exactly straightforward to do. There are high standards for becoming an editor at these journals; to maintain quality, they typically want editors with a track-record of publications in comparable venues. Moreover, being an editor is a pretty thankless job. It takes a lot of work, the pay isn’t exactly fantastic, and there are virtually no professional benefits for taking it on. (Speaking for myself, I have absolutely no desire to become a journal editor given how time-consuming it would be).

    The only thing you can really do is to try to plan ahead. In my personal experience, it usually takes about 2 years between when I deem a paper ‘finished’ before it is accepted for publication. That’s an approximate average – it’s sometimes taken less time, and sometimes more. If you are a PhD student planning on hitting the market in your 6th year, that means it’s probably a good idea to have publishable papers ready by the beginning of your 4th, so that you have lines on your CV by the time you are going on the market.

    Reply
  9. Anonymous

    BJPS is great. They typically take a couple of weeks to desk reject. And I’m sure they receive as many submissions as other allegedly ‘great’ journals

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      Speculation here: I don’t think BJPS, great as it is, receives the same volume of submissions than a top generalist journal. Also, the culture in the vicinity of science is “fast” while the generalist is “slow” (not referring to intellect, but the speed of engagement). Moreover, it is often more obvious when a paper falls short of BJPS, than when one falls short of PPR.

      Reply
    2. Anonymous

      It took them a month to desk reject a paper of mine, but at least they are reasonable with the waiting time for papers they do send out for review.

      Reply
  10. AGT

    Perhaps having more journals would be a good idea. Or paid editors and even reviewers (as in other fields, e.g., economics). In any case, some way of allowing these people to do their job without using their spare time. All this unpaid free work in your spare time is particularly annoying in all those cases when the journal is run by a major publisher who is reaping all the benefits (and of course this problem does not stop here). I sit on editorial boards, referee obviously for all these journals, etc etc, and all of this is unpaid ‘service for the profession’. Absurd. (And no, I am not saying this because I want more money. It is the time factor that matters here. If the needed time could be provided without bringing in money (which tends to distort things), that would be best. But right now, some places acknowledge at least editorial work in their time calculations at the workplace, but that is about it. And not even this is widespread practice.)

    I think criticizing journals in the present setup for being badly run is unfair in almost all cases. Almost all of this is basically unpaid charity work. We don’t criticize the soup kitchen for being too slow in handing out soups…

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      I think faculty who do editing work should qualify for something like a teaching reduction. Then there would be a sense that their paid work time is covering this component of their academic work. Universities/departments might also put more weight on this type of work in considering promotion and hiring decisions. I agree with you about the issue being primarily time rather than money. Most faculty I know literally cannot complete the amount of work they are supposed to do within a standard work week. This is a structural problem with academia so I can’t really feel mad about typical journal decision times.

      Reply
      1. Anonymous

        I really wish universities could have such a foresight. Working in the UK, my employer just told us to refuse as much referee work as possible, because refereeing neither boosts institutional prestige nor helps with institutional finance.

      2. Jacob Rump

        “Universities/departments might also put more weight on this type of work in considering promotion and hiring decisions.” -I’d second a lot of what anonymous says, and especially this. Another thing that would help, along the same lines, is if hiring departments would stop using journal rankings as a proxy for philosophical quality of job candidates (rather than, say, actually reading their writing samples). Top journals are being flooded with submissions because candidates perceive, correctly, that unless they have a recent PhD from the most prestigious departments (those people don’t have to publish first, apparently), they have virtually no shot at a good tenure-track job without having published in those journals. There are lots of other journals that contain quality philosophy but don’t have prestige. The problem is that few young philosophers submit to them because it does them little good on the job market. If we want the work to be more evenly spread around, we have to stop using prestige as a proxy for quality.

    2. Anonymous

      This comparison doesn’t work. A soup kitchen is an alternative to an existing industry. For us non-tenured people in search of a position, there is no way around publishing, and if we don’t, we “die.” If people died because soup is handed out too slowly, people would also criticize soup kitchens. As charitable (and appreciated) editorial work it, people on the other end are slowly wasting away in despair and poverty.

      Reply
      1. AGT

        I think if people criticized soup kitchens in the situation you describe their criticism would still be misplaced. It is the system that leads to soup kitchens that should be attacked. Same with the present publishing situation. Sure, it is perfectly understandable why people criticize journals, but I think their criticism is still misplaced most of the time (not always, obviously, since some journals are indeed badly run etc).

  11. AGT

    Most universities in the English-speaking part of the world are run as businesses. This is of course absurd. But absurd or not, once they are run as business, they behave as business: they want most bang for their buck. They want as much income as possible with as little investment and at as low cost as possible. So, naturally, they won’t care about services for the profession since it brings no income and does not reduce costs. Of course, journals, refereeing, and so on are all essential for what universities are really about: free inquiry (you know, truth and beauty) and teaching based on it. So, we get a clash: what universities should be for versus how they are run. There can be no good end to this.

    Reply
  12. Grad student

    Regarding the-people-are-busy explanation, some of these journals surely could use a few more editors based on the perceived editor-to-number-of-submission ratio. I understand that it is hard to recruit people for the reasons people have discussed in this thread. But perhaps some people would accept an editor position with a negotiated, capped number of submissions they need to screen each month. That could be a small number, in principle, but help with the load as long as enough people take up this type of position. (Ergo has a large number of submissions but also a large editorial team).

    Also, I’ve recently got a desk rejection with a brief email explaining why. The comments were very helpful particularly regarding the reason why they rejected it and where I shall submit next. I think a lot of the frustration came from the whole process being a total black box. Two or three candid, specific comments could be super helpful (and editors can always add a lengthier paragraph afterwards “but this is based on a quick read and may not be just or fair. In that case the responsibility is ours and we wish you the best success and welcome your other work.”)

    Reply
  13. Anonymous

    Just as an addition to the discussion of this thread, it is worth highlighting that what is being revealed here is that grad students and postdocs truly have no idea how busy faculty actually are, and nor do they have a robust understanding of what the job actually looks like once you get there.

    This is not a criticism of grad students or postdocs at all. I started a TT job last year, and grad school and postdocs (if they are research only) are different ‘jobs’ to what you actually do as faculty. There are so many competing demands on your time, and there is just so much to juggle, and postdocing and grad school did not actually prepare me so as to have a more meaningful understanding of that. Half of these suggestions lead me to baulk and think to myself “There’s no way I would have time to do that”.

    A lot of the “black box” of these things is because faculty are extremely busy people and, if you think you are busy in during your PhD, you don’t know the half of it. This is something that I wish I had known earlier.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      Second this. I feel a lot less a researcher compared to not having a continuing position. But still, reviewing roughly twice a month, and never exceeded a week for any given review.

      Reply
      1. Anonymous

        I don’t read these frustrations as criticisms from either side, but rather as symptoms of a systemic crisis. We are caught in an impossible bottleneck where non-TT scholars desperately need rapid publications to survive the market, while TT faculty are too buried by institutional demands to process the review pipeline.

        Neither group is at fault—both are just surviving a broken system where the required output simply outpaces the workforce’s capacity to review it. Rather than trading frustrations across career stages, what concrete structural changes can we actually implement to fix the math and move forward?

  14. Anonymous

    “what concrete structural changes can we actually implement to fix the math and move forward?”

    There really are no such changes that could be implemented. It’s a basic supply (of reviewers) vs. demand (of submissions needing review) problem. For any journal, there are hundreds to thousands of submissions annually, and far fewer suitably qualified/ published (on a particular subfield) referees… and as already noted on this thread, those potential referees are far busier, and get asked multiple times a month, by multiple journals) to review, and that’s usually AFTER a submission passes editorial desk-reject stage (and thus editors have to screen through hundreds of submissions a year to decide whether to desk-reject. And it can take weeks or months for 2 reviewers to finally accept refereeing requests… All this takes a lot of time, especially when it is a partial goal to give someone comments (whether for rejection, or R&R). So long as the number of submissions far exceeds (by at least an order of magnitude) the pool of reviewers, there is no math to fix.

    The most available structural change to be made would be for grad students and early career folks to send out fewer submissions each year (and especially to eliminate the poor, half-baked ones)… but we all know that won’t happen (how would it? Who would encourage it or enforce it?).

    Reply

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