Reviewer Capacity Under Pressure: Can Peer Review Keep Pace with Growing Manuscript Submissions?

01 Sep 2026

Peer review remains essential to scholarly publishing, helping journals evaluate the quality, relevance, validity, and originality of research.

However, the system depends on a limited resource: reviewer time.

As manuscript submissions increase, journals need to manage more screening, reviewer searches, invitations, follow-ups, reviews, revisions, and editorial decisions. Reviewer availability, however, is not necessarily increasing at the same pace. This imbalance is placing growing pressure on peer-review workflows.

Recent industry data highlights the scale of this challenge.

A May 2026 article in The Scholarly Kitchen by Josh Dahl examined submission growth across the ScholarOne platform. According to the article, journals using ScholarOne Manuscripts received 33% more submissions in Q1 2026 compared with Q1 2025.

The increase was particularly significant among smaller journals. Journals receiving fewer than 15 submissions per quarter in 2025 experienced an 81% increase, while journals receiving more than 1,500 submissions saw approximately 20% growth.

Growing research activity is encouraging, but every additional submission also creates additional editorial work.

Before a manuscript reaches peer review, editors must determine whether it meets the journal's scope and submission requirements. They must then identify appropriate reviewers, send invitations, track responses, follow up on deadlines, evaluate reports, and manage revisions.

The workflow can quickly expand:

More Submissions → More Screening → More Reviewer Searches → More Invitations → More Reviews → More Editorial Decisions

Finding reviewers can be particularly challenging. Editors may need to invite several researchers before securing enough reviewers, while some invitations may be declined or remain unanswered.

This can lead to longer reviewer searches, delayed reviews, repeated invitations to the same researchers, and longer manuscript decision times.

The challenge is therefore not simply to find more reviewers. It is to use available reviewer capacity more effectively.

One way to reduce unnecessary reviewer workload is through stronger pre-review screening.

Before sending manuscripts for external review, editorial teams can check:

• Journal Scope and Subject Relevance

• Manuscript Completeness

• Required Declarations

• Plagiarism and Similarity Concerns

• Authorship Information

• Conflicts of Interest

• Ethical Documentation

• Submission Guidelines

• Basic Formatting Requirements

This helps ensure that reviewers spend their limited time on manuscripts that have already passed essential editorial checks.

The pressure on this stage is already visible. The original industry analysis cited in this blog reported that desk rejections increased 72% between 2022 and 2025, compared with a 43% increase in overall submission decisions.

A significant portion of peer-review management involves repetitive administrative activities.

Editors need to send invitations, monitor responses, issue reminders, track deadlines, maintain reviewer histories, and communicate manuscript status.

These activities are necessary, but they do not all require manual intervention.

Technology can help automate routine coordination while keeping important editorial decisions in human hands.

The objective should not be to replace reviewers or editors. Instead, technology should protect their time and allow them to concentrate on research quality and scholarly judgment.

As submission volumes increase, Kryoni Journal Management System (JMS) can help journals build a more structured and manageable peer-review workflow.

Kryoni JMS supports manuscript scope checking during the pre-review stage, helping editors determine whether a submission aligns with the journal's defined scope before moving it further into the review workflow.

Identifying out-of-scope manuscripts earlier can prevent unnecessary reviewer assignments and help preserve reviewer capacity for relevant submissions.

Centralized reviewer information can help editors identify and manage reviewers based on relevant expertise and previous review activity, reducing the effort required to coordinate reviewer assignments.

Better visibility into active and previous review assignments can help editorial teams distribute reviews more effectively and reduce repeated dependence on the same reviewers.

Automated notifications and reminders can reduce manual follow-ups while helping reviewers stay informed about invitations, deadlines, and required actions.

Keeping reviewer, editor, and manuscript communication within a structured journal management environment can reduce fragmented email exchanges and provide clearer workflow visibility.

Editors can track manuscripts through submission, screening, peer review, revision, and decision stages from a centralized workflow, making it easier to identify delays and take action when required.

Together, these capabilities can help journals manage increasing submission volumes while reducing unnecessary administrative pressure on editorial teams and reviewers.

AI is also becoming part of the peer-review discussion.

It can potentially assist with activities such as manuscript screening, reviewer discovery, and administrative checks. At the same time, AI introduces questions around confidentiality, transparency, accuracy, and research integrity.

For peer review, human expertise must remain central.

The most effective approach will be to use AI and automation to handle appropriate repetitive and administrative activities while allowing editors and reviewers to retain responsibility for scholarly evaluation and decision-making.

The 33% year-over-year increase in Q1 2026 submissions highlighted in The Scholarly Kitchen should be viewed as more than a growth statistic. It demonstrates the increasing pressure being placed on scholarly publishing infrastructure.

Journals cannot sustainably respond by simply asking editors and reviewers to manage more work.

They need workflows that support stronger screening, efficient reviewer management, workload visibility, automated coordination, and human editorial oversight.

Kryoni JMS helps journals address these challenges through a structured, centralized, and technology-enabled editorial workflow.

The future of sustainable peer review is not about asking reviewers to do more. It is about using their expertise where it matters most and using technology to manage the work around them.

Dahl, Josh. Guest Post - Is Growth Always Good News? 2026 Article Submission Surges. The Scholarly Kitchen, May 13, 2026.