Does a cancellation of an accepted review request before the due date happen often?

Question

I accepted a paper review request of an ESCI journal last month. A few days later the editorial office wrote me they no longer needed my review. Last week they sent a request for the same paper again. I accepted and received a manuscript and the authors' responses to the reviewers through Spinger Nature portal. I understood the manuscript as a revised paper. A few days later when I finished reviewing and was writing a report, the editorial office sent a message saying "report no longer required" again. I wasted my whole day when I could do other works instead. I wrote an editorial office. Their reply was: "Please be informed that several agreed-upon referees submitted their reports, and this submission has already been accepted for publication". If this happens, it will become difficult for us researchers to accept to review a paper any longer. Do you all accept a review request while taking this kind of risk?

Answer 1

I will guess that having this happen twice on the same paper is an outlier, though cancelling requests happens for a variety of reasons.

I'll also guess that the paper was also an outlier in some sense. Perhaps someone noticed quite quickly that the paper had serious issues. Since the cancellation request came after "a few days" in both cases that seems like something other than the normal process (for most journals).

Most editors would appreciate that you jumped on the paper immediately, though it resulted in you wasting a full day. A lot of folks put off their reviews until near the due date for a variety of reasons. This can lead to editors making more than the minimum number of requests "just to be safe".

Answer 2

I am not aware of any statistics on how often this happens. I believe that a cancelation of a review request only happened to me once, and then before I had gotten around to that paper. I agree that your experience is frustrating.

Note that even finding people willing to review a paper is hard. It appears that in your case, the handling editor invited more people than necessary, or did not trust the people they invited to submit their review.

If you as an editor need three reviews and invite three reviewers, and then one of them ghosts you for a year before you uninvite them and try to find a replacement, this just wasted a full year for everyone. Your editor may have had some bad recent experience along these lines and therefore pulled in more people.

Unfortunately, I do not see a good solution for this problem other than inviting more reviewers than strictly necessary. Keeping track of who is how reliable as a reviewer is not really helpful, as you end up concentrating the review work on the few people who are reliable.

Of course, you can keep this experience in mind for the future. You could not accept requests from this particular editor any more. Or give them one more chance and do this only if this happens again.

Answer 3

There're two questions in the OP:

Does a cancellation of an accepted review request before the due date happen often?

This happens with some regularity at publishers that heavily prioritize speed (looking at MDPI). That's because they'd really rather not wait for you to finish before proceeding to the next step. However, even in these situations it is normal to ask the reviewer before cancelling (exception applies if you don't accept the review invitation in the first place). These emails take the form "we no longer need your review, have you started and if no would you like to cancel" - and if you answer with "I'd like to finish" then it's normal to wait (although some publishers in an extreme hurry might send for decision anyway, expecting a revise decision, and then attach the late review).

For all other publishers this is rare. If it happens, one would guess of exceptional circumstances (see e.g. the scenario I described in this answer).

Do you all accept a review request while taking this kind of risk?

Yes. The odds of this happening are very low, because at least in my field, reviews take ~1 day to complete and the time given is ~30 days. The chance of the editor wanting to cancel (itself a low-probability event) during that window where I have started but before I have finished (30-to-1 odds against, naively estimated), is quite low. I imagine many researchers never experience it in their professional career. Besides, even if it does happen it's not something to get angry about - sort of finding out the review that you worked really hard on to complete by the deadline turned out not to be necessary for another two weeks, because the other reviewer needed the extension.