I recently submitted a paper to an Elsevier journal in the management area, where I can track the review status. After submitting the paper, I found that one of the reviewers completed the review just three days after accepting the invitation to review the paper. I am confused about how someone can complete the review so quickly, and I wonder if this means it is more likely to be a rejection from the reviewer.
Your inputs are appreciated based on your experience.
It means exactly nothing. The reviewer probably had a little downtime when the request came in and immediately wrote the review. Could be good, could be bad. You will know when you get the review.
Word of advice: don't look at the status of your paper. It says nothing, and even if it would say something, there is nothing you can do with that hypothetical information. So any second you spent on looking at the status is a second wasted. Just forget that paper exist until you get the reviews back.
If I get a review request and I have the time, I do it quickly. Otherwise, I might forget and then end up remainder emails shortly before the deadline. The reality of being faculty at a university is just that I cannot afford to spend days on a review. I will usually read some of the cited work with which I am not familiar with. I will also usually wait for a night's sleep before I send off the review, since a second, fresh reading might make me see something different or make me reconsider the tone of my remarks.
Thus, as a reviewer, it might take only two days after receiving a review request, or it might take much longer. If I get a bunch of review request, I prioritize by ease of review. Clear rejections are the easiest.
This is my way of proceeding and others do it differently. I just added this as an answer because you want to get general feed-back.
By the way: The advice by Maarten Buis is spot-on.
Quick reviews are generally not rushed reviews. As a reviewer, I make a point to review papers as soon as I accept them, and I don't accept them unless I have time to really do a good job. Generally, reviewers are busy people, and I've found that put anything off until right before the deadline tend to do a worse job at it.
Don't stress yourself out. I've personally experienced or caused all of the following:
In summary, whether the review is quick or slow is not highly correlated with whether it will be a desk reject, approve without revisions, or anything in between.
As an extremely specific conjecture: this answer was written mid-July-2024. A good reviewer will probably have put in extra time to get it done now just before classes start, which could explain the very quick review turnaround. (You'll probably never know.)
