Peer review statistics: acceptance rates, rejections, review times, and what the evidence says
89 statistics on peer review, each quoted from its primary source and verified 12 September 2026: acceptance rates, desk rejection, reasons for rejection, review times, reviewers, reliability, bias, retractions, reproducibility, AI. Cite freely.
Twelve numbers to quote.
How many papers are published each year, and how fast is it growing?
The pressure on peer review starts with volume. Crossref, the DOI registry used by nearly every scholarly publisher, holds records for more than twice as many journal articles published in 2025 as in 2015, and the count of indexed articles rose roughly 47% between 2016 and 2022 while the number of practicing scientists barely moved. Submissions grow faster than publications, and review invitations grow faster than either.[11][9][6]
Crossref lists 6,628,652 journal articles with a 2025 publication date, up from 3,342,205 for 2015. [11]
The number of articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science was about 47% higher in 2022 than in 2016. [9]
Science's overall growth rate is 4.10% a year, a doubling time of 17.3 years. [10]
Since 2013, submissions have grown 6.1% a year while publications have grown 2.6% a year. [6]
Review invitations are growing 9.8% a year, twice as fast as accepted articles (4.9%). [6]
What percentage of submitted papers are accepted?
Across all journals the average acceptance rate is somewhere around 35–40%, higher in biomedicine than in the social sciences.[1] At the top of medicine the number is an order of magnitude lower, and it is falling: JAMA Pediatrics' research acceptance rate dropped from 7% in 2024 to 5% in 2025 while submissions rose.[55] The JAMA Network journals are unusual in publishing these figures every year; most journals do not, which is why the table at the bottom of this page exists.
The global average journal acceptance rate is around 35–40%, higher in biomedicine than in the social sciences. [1]
NEJM receives more than 16,000 submissions a year and publishes about 5% of original research submissions. [52]
JAMA received 11,526 manuscripts in 2025 and accepted 10.4% overall and 3.9% of research manuscripts. [53]
JAMA Internal Medicine accepted 12% of 4,178 manuscripts in 2025, and 4% of research manuscripts. [54]
JAMA Network Open received 20,233 manuscripts in 2025 and accepted 9.9%. [62]
Across nine JAMA Network journals, 2025 research acceptance rates ranged from 3.9% (JAMA) to 10% (JAMA Otolaryngology). [53][54][55][56][58][59][60][57][61]
Gut accepted 12% of submissions in 2025; the British Journal of Sports Medicine accepted 17%. [63][64]
At PLOS Medicine, about 10% of initial submissions become published articles. [65]
Elsevier journal pages that disclose a rate show Ophthalmology at 10%, Annals of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine at 11%, the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology at 20%, and Resuscitation at 28%. [66]
At the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia, 57% of 213 submissions were accepted; Canadian submissions had the highest acceptance frequency (86%). [2]
At AJR, rejection rates for the 18 countries with more than 50 submissions ranged from 22.6% to 73.4%. [3]
How many papers are rejected without peer review (desk rejection)?
Most manuscripts at selective journals never reach a reviewer. JAMA reports the share of research manuscripts it sends out for external review; in 2025 it was 23%, which means about three in four were decided by editors alone.[53] The decision is usually fast, but not always: a third of journals take more than two weeks to say no without review.[5]
JAMA sent only 23% of research manuscripts for external peer review in 2025. [53]
JAMA Internal Medicine rejected 78% of the manuscripts it received in 2017 without review; the pre-review rejection rate at Parasites & Vectors was 39%. [4]
In 2025 the median time to a first decision without peer review at JAMA Network journals ranged from 1 day (JAMA Internal Medicine) to 10 days (JAMA Surgery). [53][54][55][56][58][59][60][57][61]
One-third of journals take more than two weeks to issue a desk rejection, and one-sixth take more than four weeks. [5]
Editors screening without review are checking fit, novelty, and whether the manuscript is complete enough to be worth a reviewer's hours. The reasons are documented and predictable; see desk rejection prevention for the patterns, and the next section for the evidence.
Why are papers rejected?
In a content analysis of 151 medical-education manuscripts, the top reasons for rejection were inappropriate or incomplete statistics, overinterpretation of results, and inappropriate or suboptimal instrumentation. [12][14]
Reviewers found flaws in the methods of 85.7% of 42 manuscripts submitted to medical journals in Africa and Asia, and in the references of 69.0%. [13]
Lack of new or useful knowledge was the most common reason for rejection at AJR, accounting for 44–76% of rejections in every country. [3]
Respiratory Care's editor ranked poor study design, inadequate description of the methods, and suboptimal reporting of results among the top reasons manuscripts are not published. [14]
Only 44% of 19,123 conference abstracts were published as full papers within six years, according to the analysis summarised by Pierson. [14]
At the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia, the relationship between design, results and conclusions, and originality, drove decisions; presentation issues were rarely cited. [2]
How long does peer review take?
Two clocks run in parallel. The reviewer's clock is short: a median of 16.4 days from accepting an invitation to returning the report, and a median of five hours of actual work.[6] The author's clock is long, because finding reviewers takes more invitations every year and manuscripts wait between steps. Authors reporting their experience to SciRev waited an average of 13 weeks for a first decision, and a tenth waited more than six months.[5]
Authors reported an average first-response time of 13 weeks, ranging from 8–9 weeks in medicine and public health to 16–18 weeks in economics, mathematics and the humanities. [5]
About one-third of authors (32%) waited three months or more for a first decision, and 10% waited more than six months; rejected manuscripts took four weeks longer. [5]
Reviewers take a median of 16.4 days to complete a review after accepting the invitation (mean 19.1 days). [6]
Editors needed 2.4 review invitations to get one completed review in 2017, up from 1.9 in 2013. [6]
JAMA's median time to a first decision with peer review was 25 days in 2025; JAMA Cardiology's was 51 days. [53][58][61][62][55][56][57][54][59][60]
At JAMA Internal Medicine the median time from receipt to publication was 122 days in 2025. [54]
Elsevier's published timelines range from 1 day to a first decision at The Lancet Infectious Diseases to 126 days to a post-review decision at The Lancet Digital Health. [66]
How much work is peer review, and who does it?
Peer review is unpaid labor at a scale that is easy to miss because it is spread across millions of people. Two independent estimates put the annual total in the tens of millions to more than a hundred million hours, and both find the load concentrated on a small fraction of researchers.[7][8] The geography is skewed too: the regions that produce a growing share of papers do a shrinking share of the reviewing.[6]
Reviewers worldwide spent more than 100 million hours on peer review in 2020, the equivalent of more than 15,000 years. [7]
The unpaid reviewing time of US-based reviewers was worth over $1.5 billion in 2020; China-based reviewers over $600 million; UK-based close to $400 million. [7]
An estimated 63.4 million hours went into biomedical peer review in 2015, and 20% of researchers performed 69–94% of the reviews. [8]
Among contributing researchers, 70% spent 1% or less of their research time on peer review, while 5% spent 13% or more. [8]
On Publons, about 10% of reviewers are responsible for about 50% of peer review records. [6]
75% of journal editors say finding reviewers and getting them to accept invitations is the hardest part of their job. [6]
The USA contributes 32.9% of reviews but 25.4% of articles; China contributes 8.8% of reviews but 13.8% of articles. [6]
Emerging regions produced 29.3% of Web of Science articles but performed 18.9% of ScholarOne reviews (2013–2017), and 96.1% of editors are from established regions. [6]
A reviewer spends a median of 5 hours writing each review; after desk rejections, submissions average 2.7 reviews each. [6]
The most common reasons reviewers decline: too busy with their own research (70.6%) and the article being outside their expertise (42%). [6]
How reliable is peer review? Do reviewers agree?
When two reviewers read the same manuscript, their recommendations agree only slightly better than chance. That is the consistent finding of the meta-analysis and of single-journal audits, and it explains why the same paper can be rejected at one journal and accepted at the next. Editors, for their part, follow unanimous reviewers and use judgment when reviewers split.[15][16]
Across 48 studies and 19,443 manuscripts, agreement between reviewers is low: mean intraclass correlation 0.34 and mean Cohen's kappa 0.17. [15]
At the Journal of General Internal Medicine, chance-corrected agreement between reviewers on rejection was kappa 0.11 across 5,881 reviews of 2,264 manuscripts. [16]
Editors rejected 88% of manuscripts when all reviewers agreed on rejection (7% of manuscripts) and 20% when all reviewers agreed the manuscript should not be rejected. [16]
When 12 already-published articles were resubmitted to the journals that had published them, only 3 of 38 editors and reviewers noticed, and 8 of the 9 that went through review were rejected. [17]
How often do reviewers miss errors?
BMJ reviewers found an average of 2.58 of nine major errors deliberately inserted into a test paper; training raised this only to about 3. [18]
Reviewers who recommended accepting a fictitious manuscript identified 17.3% of its major errors; those who recommended rejection identified 39.1%. [20]
In a randomized trial at the BMJ, reviewers commented on a mean of two weaknesses in a paper containing deliberately inserted weaknesses, regardless of blinding or signing. [19]
Only 23% of 107 leading biomedical journals use specialist statistical review for all articles; 34% rarely or never do, little changed since 1998. [42]
Adding a statistical reviewer improved the quality of the final manuscript (standardized mean difference 0.58). [24]
Reviewers find roughly a quarter to a third of major methodological errors, and journals rarely add a statistician. Errors that survive review are the ones that later drive corrections, retractions and failed replications. Checking a manuscript against the relevant reporting checklist before submission is the one intervention with consistent evidence behind it.[18][42][23]
Does peer review actually improve papers?
Yes, measurably, and less than its reputation suggests. The best before-and-after study found improvement on almost every quality item, but the size of the improvement was modest; the systematic reviews conclude that the effects of editorial peer review remain largely untested.[21][22]
At Annals of Internal Medicine, 33 of 34 manuscript-quality items improved after peer review and editing; the share of items scored 3 or more rose by 7.3 percentage points from a 75% baseline. [21]
A 2002 systematic review found editorial peer review "largely untested and its effects are uncertain"; only 19 of 135 identified studies met its criteria. [22]
The Cochrane review found no clear-cut evidence that concealing reviewer or author identity affects quality (9 studies), some evidence for checklists (2), and no evidence that reviewer training helps (1). [23]
Open peer review slightly improved the quality of review reports (SMD 0.14) and lowered the odds of rejection (OR 0.56) across randomized trials. [24]
What do researchers think of peer review?
Researchers are more satisfied with peer review than the reliability data would predict, and satisfaction has risen over a decade of surveys. They also draw a sharp line around what counts: assessment by at least two researchers is peer review; a look from one editor is not.[26][25]
Nine out of ten authors believe peer review improved the last paper they published, in a 2009 survey of more than 4,000 researchers. [25]
Researcher satisfaction with peer review rose from 69% in 2009 to 75% in 2019. [26]
90% of researchers surveyed in 2019 (91% in 2009) said peer review improves the quality of published research, and 85% said there would be no control in scientific communication without it. [26]
62% of researchers found the majority of research they encountered trustworthy, but 37% had doubts about at least some research outputs they had seen in the previous week. [26]
87% of researchers count assessment by at least two researchers as peer review; only 27% count evaluation by two editorial board members, and 12% a single editor. [26]
98% of surveyed reviewers consider peer review important or extremely important, and 84.8% think institutions should explicitly recognize reviewing. [6]
Is peer review biased?
Single-blind reviewers were 1.63 times more likely to recommend papers from famous authors, 1.58 times for top universities, and 2.10 times for top companies, and bid for 22% fewer papers. [27]
The same paper was rejected by 23% of reviewers when a Nobel laureate was the visible author, 48% when anonymized, and 65% when an unknown early-career author was shown. [28]
Under open review, 40.8% of US abstracts and 22.6% of non-US abstracts were accepted at the American Heart Association meeting; blinding narrowed the gap to 33.4% versus 23.7%. [29]
Reviewers recommended a fabricated trial for publication 97.3% of the time when its result was positive and 80.0% when it showed no difference, and found more errors in the no-difference version, though the methods were identical. [30]
38% of reviews pair an editor and a reviewer from the same region, against 14% expected if reviewers were chosen in proportion to regional reviewing. [6]
How common are retractions, and what causes them?
Retractions are rare relative to output and rising in absolute terms. The 2023 spike is dominated by one publisher's mass retractions; 2024 and 2025 settled at roughly six thousand a year in the Retraction Watch Database, which we counted directly from the Crossref-hosted CSV.[33][34] Most retractions are attributed to misconduct rather than honest error, and a documented new source of unreliable papers is fabricated references produced by language models.[31][35]
Of 2,047 retracted biomedical articles, 67.4% were attributable to misconduct (fraud or suspected fraud 43.4%, duplicate publication 14.2%, plagiarism 9.8%) and 21.3% to error. [31]
The share of articles retracted for fraud rose about 10-fold between 1975 and 2012. [31]
About 2% of scientists admit to having fabricated, falsified or modified data at least once; up to 33.7% admit other questionable research practices. [32]
Retractions of research articles passed 10,000 in 2023, an annual record. [33]
The Retraction Watch Database held 66,901 retraction records on 12 September 2026; 13,226 are dated 2023, of which 9,673 are Hindawi titles, followed by 6,356 in 2024 and 5,905 in 2025. [34]
55% of the references ChatGPT-3.5 generated for literature reviews were fabricated, versus 18% for GPT-4; 43% and 24% of the real ones contained substantive errors. [35]
How reproducible are published findings?
Only 36% of 100 replications of psychology studies produced statistically significant results, and 47% of original effect sizes fell within the replication's 95% confidence interval. [36]
In 50 replicated preclinical cancer experiments, the median replication effect size was 85% smaller than the original, and 92% of replication effects were smaller than the original. [37]
How complete are published reports, and how common are statistical and reference errors?
The problems peer review is supposed to catch are common in the published record: interventions described too thinly to replicate, primary outcomes that changed between registration and publication, p-values that do not match their test statistics, and quotations that do not say what the citing paper claims.[38][39][41][43] The one bright spot is reporting guidelines: journals that endorse CONSORT publish more complete trial reports.[40]
Poor description of interventions made 40–89% of published trial reports non-replicable, and most studies had at least one primary outcome changed, introduced or omitted. [38]
Only 45.5% of 323 published trials were adequately registered, and 31% of those showed discrepancies between registered and published primary outcomes; 82.6% of assessable discrepancies favored statistically significant results. [39]
Across 50 evaluations of 16,604 randomized trials, 69 of 81 meta-analyses favored journals that endorse CONSORT for completeness of reporting. [40]
Half of published psychology papers using null-hypothesis tests contained at least one p-value inconsistent with its test statistic, and one in eight contained a gross inconsistency that may have changed the conclusion. [41]
"Standards in the use of statistics in medical research are generally low," with persistent errors reported across most medical journals. [44]
A meta-analysis of 28 studies found 25.4% of quotations in medical journal articles were inaccurate: 11.9% major and 11.5% minor errors. [43]
How is AI changing peer review?
Language models are already inside the review process, mostly undeclared. The measurable share of AI-modified review text at machine-learning conferences is in the single to low double digits, LLM feedback overlaps with human reviewers about as much as two humans overlap with each other, and the largest research funder in the world has banned generative AI from its grant review.[45][46][47]
Between 6.5% and 16.9% of the text submitted as peer reviews to four AI conferences could have been substantially modified by large language models. [45]
GPT-4's feedback overlapped with human reviewers' points 30.85% of the time for Nature-family papers and 39.23% for ICLR, comparable to overlap between two human reviewers (28.58% and 35.25%). [46]
57.4% of researchers who tried LLM-generated feedback found it helpful or very helpful, and 82.4% found it more beneficial than feedback from at least some human reviewers. [46]
NIH prohibits its peer reviewers from using generative AI to analyze or formulate critiques of grant applications (notice issued 23 June 2023). [47]
PeerReviewAI is built for authors, not reviewers: a pre-submission review of your own manuscript, with every reference checked against PubMed and Crossref and the reporting checklist audited item by item, so the errors in the sections above are found before an editor sees them. It never issues an accept or reject verdict. See the full sample review.
Where do manuscripts go, and where did peer review come from?
Acceptance rates at the top journal in each medical field (2025–2026)
We took the Scimago Journal Rank (2024 edition), selected in each medicine category the highest-ranked journal whose title names the field, excluding review-only titles, supplements and bulletins, applied a clinician's overrides where the ranking produced a mismatch, and then looked for a published acceptance rate on each journal's own site or in its annual editorial. The result: only 17 of 49 publish one. Elsevier's Journal Insights pages publish decision timelines for most titles and an acceptance rate for a few; BMJ journals publish both; the JAMA Network publishes everything; Wiley, Nature Portfolio and several society sites publish nothing we could capture.
How these numbers were verified
Every statistic on this page was traced to its primary source and quoted from that source's own text: the authors' abstract or open-access full text for journal articles (records retrieved through Europe PMC and Crossref), the report PDF for industry and survey reports, the journal's own site or annual editorial for acceptance rates, and a direct query of the Crossref API and the Crossref-hosted Retraction Watch CSV for the counts we computed ourselves. Figures that could only be found in secondary roundups, or behind paywalls we could not read, were left out. The verification ledger records the verbatim sentence, DOI or URL, and capture date for each entry.
Last verified 12 September 2026. Journal acceptance rates and vendor prices change; the capture date is stated wherever a figure is time-sensitive. Corrections: use the contact form and cite the statistic ID shown in the ledger.
Questions, answered.
Don't see yours? Email us — we read every one.
References and sources
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