A Shorter Invitation Period for Manuscript Reviewers: Impact on Time to Completion of Reviews.

The objective of this article was to study the effect of decreasing the time allowed an () reviewer to consider an invitation to review on time for two invitees to accept an invitation and time for both reviewers to return reviews. Neuroradiology manuscripts submitted between September 2015 and June 2017 were randomly assigned in a blinded manner to one of two groups. The groups allowed either a 3-day or a 1-day period for invited reviewers to accept the invitation to review. The manuscript database was examined to determine the effect of the invitation acceptance period on time needed for two reviewers to accept an invitation, the number of reviewers who needed to be contacted before two accepted, and the period of time required for both reviewers to submit their review. The differences were then analyzed using a two-sample test. A total of 87 manuscripts were sent to reviewers who had 1 day to respond to the invitation and 114 manuscripts were sent to reviewers with a 3-day invitation. The mean length of time for two reviewers to accept invitations was 6.65 days in the 1-day group and 10.24 days in the 3-day group ( = 0.04). The mean number of reviewers contacted before two accepted was 6.14 in the 1-day group and 6.36 in the 3-day group ( = 0.71). The mean number of days before two completed reviews were submitted by the 1-day group was 27.97 days, and the mean number for the 3-day group was 31.53 days ( = 0.04). The results suggest that allowing a shorter time for prospective reviewers to consider an invitation can decrease the time needed for the required number of reviewers to accept an invitation to review and for completed reviews to be submitted.