Referee reports not coming It happened the third time to me and I start wondering what is going on? I have submitted two papers since May last year (11 months) and didn't get any answer. I wrote to the editors and they answered to me the following:

One of them said that it was very hard to find a referee for the paper and finally they succeeded to find a person willing to referee the paper.

Yesterday the other editor told me that the two referees where the paper was sent "eventually didn't write a report. We are now trying to get a report from a third referee".

In the last two years I noticed a very long delay in receiving reports for my papers. It also happened to a reasonable journal, JA, to receive a favourable report  after some corrections are done. After I sent the corrections back I didn't receive anything back for six months. When I wrote to the editor, he wrote to me that the referee refused to answer emails and then he sent the paper to another referee, starting practically from scratch the reviewing process. The paper was finally rejected after 9 months.

Please help me concerning the following matters. Although I never commented on referee/editor's decisions it seems that something has changed. The community does not want to referee my papers anymore. Once I got a first rejection on the reason that the table of contents is not symmetric. 

My question is the following:

Is anything I can do with respect to this matter? What should I write to those editors. I have asked clearly when should I receive report on my paper and didn't get any clear answer.

Finally it is my work and cannot be just deleted as some people/referee like, but these delays somehow have ruined the scores for my ongoing research grant.

Maybe I should add that most of the journals I am talking about are well established journals in the field, some of them being in the top (first quarter) of the AI/ISI ranking etc.
As always, one needs to look within oneself. Ask yourself the following questions:


How broadly interesting is your oeuvre? In my experience, difficulty in finding a referee often indicates that the field is very narrow, and the editors are looking for a referee to check whether a paper is a breakthrough in the narrow field. Otherwise, the paper is rejected.
How well-written are the papers? Especially the introduction - if the prospective referee's eyes glaze over when s/he reads it, s/he probably won't want to referee the paper. I realize that the author is not the best judge for this, but show the paper to a friend.
You can usually get papers published quicker if you submit to a lesser journal (and I assume that it is ALREADY published on arxiv.org). The optimization problem (quality vs speed) is for you to solve. From a careerist standpoint, the journal weighting is very nonlinear: a single paper in Annals of Math is worth essentially an infinite number in, say, PAMS (no insult meant). If you are already established, then you might not care. If not, you might.


Just one man's opinion (though I am active on several editorial boards, so the opinion is somewhat informed).