How long does it take to publish a paper?
I posted the picture below on Twitter to show how long it takes for us to publish a paper.
The answer is 235 days. This is the median time from submission at the first journal to publication online or in print. The data are from our last ten papers.
The infographic proved popular with 40 retweets and 22 favourites. It was pointed out to me that the a few things would improve this visualisation:
1. Showing the names of the journals
2. Showing when the 1st submission was relative to the 1st submission at the journal that finally accepted the paper
3. What about reviews and other types of publication.
I am working on updating the graph to show all of these things… watch this space.
My point was really to show (perhaps to non-scientists) how long the process of publishing a paper can be. There is other information that can be gleaned from this, e.g. what proportion of time is at the journal’s side and how much is at our end?
The people who are eager to see which journals perform badly (slowly) will be disappointed: this is a very small subset of papers from one lab. I’d be interested in scraping the information on journal tardiness on a larger scale and synthesising this so that it can inform journal choice. Recently though major publishers have taken steps to make this information less accessible so don’t hold your breath.
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The title of this post is from So Long by Cian Ciarán from the LP ‘Outside In’