Hi Anika. Thanks for your response. Unfortunate to hear how long it took for you, but you seem to have handled it very pragmatically. You seem to great academic resilience. Answered by Irfan Syed on 17 Sep, Confirm that you would also like to sign up for free personalized email coaching for this stage.
Manuscript Status. Q: My manuscript's been "Under Review" for 3 months. How long should I wait to contact the journal editor for an update? Answer Follow this Question. Answer: I understand that waiting for the journal to get back to you is a stressful and nailbiting time, more so since you want your paper to be published by a certain deadline. Ten days later, the paper was rejected with a form letter. She sent it to another prestigious journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Next, she tried Ecology Letters. In May , she submitted the paper to Proceedings of the Royal Society B , considered a high-impact journal in her field. The journal sent it out for review — seven months after her initial submission to Science. What she didn't know was that she had taken only the first steps down the long, bumpy road to publication: it would take another three submissions, two rejections, two rounds of major revisions and numerous drafts before the paper would finally appear.
By that point, she could hardly bear to look at it. Fraser's frustration is widely shared: researchers are increasingly questioning the time it takes to publish their work. Many say that they feel trapped in a cycle of submission, rejection, review, re-review and re-re-review that seems to eat up months of their lives, interfere with job, grant and tenure applications and slow down the dissemination of results. It just takes far too long. But is the publication process actually becoming longer — and, if so, then why?
To find out, Nature examined some recent analyses on time to publication — many of them performed by researchers waiting for their own work to see the light of day — and spoke to scientists and editors about their experiences. The results contain some surprises. Daniel Himmelstein, a computational-biology graduate student at the University of California, San Francisco, analysed all the papers indexed in the PubMed database that had listed submission and acceptance dates.
His study, done for Nature , found no evidence for lengthening delays 2 : the median review time — the time between submission and acceptance of a paper — has hovered at around days for more than 30 years see 'Paper wait'. But the analysis comes with major caveats.
Not all journals — including some high-profile ones — deposit such time-stamp data in PubMed, and some journals show when a paper was resubmitted, rather than submitted for the first time. Some data suggest that wait times have increased within certain subsets of journals, such as popular open-access ones and some of the most sought-after titles. At Nature , the median review time has grown from 85 days to just above days over the past decade, according to Himmelstein's analysis, and at PLoS ONE it has risen from 37 to days over roughly the same period.
Many scientists find this odd, because they expect advances in digital publishing and the proliferation of journals to have sped things up. They say that journals are taking too long to review papers and that reviewers are requesting more data, revisions and new experiments than they used to.
Journal editors counter that science itself has become more data-rich, that they work to uphold high editorial and peer-review standards and that some are dealing with increasing numbers of papers. They also say that they are taking steps to expedite the process.
Publication practices and waiting times also vary widely by discipline — with social sciences being notoriously slow. In physics, the pressure to publish fast is reduced because of the common practice of publishing preprints — early versions of a paper before peer review — on the arXiv server.
Some of the loudest complaints about publication delays come from those in biological fields, in which competition is fierce and publishing in prestigious journals can be required for career advancement. This month, a group of more than 70 scientists, funders, journal editors and publishers are meeting at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute campus in Chevy Chase, Maryland, to discuss whether biologists should adopt the preprint model to accelerate publishing.
His latest work answered a controversial question about how cells sense that chromosomes are lined up before dividing, so he first sent it to Nature Cell Biology NCB , because it is a top journal in his field and an editor there had suggested he send it after hearing Royle give a talk. It was rejected without review. Next, he sent it to Developmental Cell. His next stop, the Journal of Cell Biology , sent the paper out for review.
It came back with a long list of necessary revisions — and a rejection. Royle and his lab spent almost six months doing the suggested experiments and revising the paper. Then he submitted the updated manuscript to Current Biology.
EMBO Journal. Reviewed and rejected. One reviewer mentioned that they had already assessed it at another journal and thought that it should have been published then. A second reviewer said that it should not be published. The editor at JCS decided to accept it. It appeared online another 53 days later 3. The work went on to win the JCS prize as the journal's top paper for Despite the accolade, Royle says that the multiple rejections were demoralizing for his student, who had done the experiments and needed the paper to graduate.
He also thinks that the paper deserved the greater exposure that comes from publication in a more prestigious journal. And Royle, who has done several publication-time analyses and blogged about what he found, has shown that this experience is not unusual. When he looked at the 28 papers that his lab had published in the previous 12 years, the average time to gestate from first submission to publication was the same as a human baby — about 9 months see go.
But how much of these delays were his own doing? The remainder of participants partially completed the questionnaire, thus the number of responses varied by question.
While we recognize that the response rate is low and the potential for sampling exists, we do not attempt to generalize the perspectives reported to the entire population of authors in field of conservation biology, but rather provide insights on the issue.
It is also important to recognize that respondents who are more likely to participate in our questionnaire are also perhaps more likely to be those who are proactive in voicing their opinions. This may lead to a male-dominant perspective in our results. Most respondents ranged between 31—40 years old Overall, responses came from countries. We categorized countries based on economic income set out by the World Bank The participant characterization suggests that the author perspectives in this article are largely biased towards industrialized nations and academia, which reflects the characteristics we would expect from the research community.
Overall, the majority of respondents have been publishing for at least 10 years and at least half of them are highly experienced with the peer-review process as both authors and referees. As such, the perspectives gathered in our questionnaire come from highly experienced authors that are actively publishing and therefore familiar with the peer-review system.
We asked participating authors about their experience with peer-review durations i. Results reported here may provide indicators for conservation biology related journals to gauge their performance on review time and improve author experiences and satisfaction.
In a broad review over respondents from across disciplines , Mulligan et al. Mulligan et al. In general, these findings are consistent with the responses we obtained from a focused survey of scientists working in conservation biology.
Therefore, faster review times should presumably be beneficial to the authors, the journals and the relevant field given the belief that review speed does not affect quality, although this has not been tested empirically. We discuss mechanisms to improve review times based on this information later in this article.
Female experience and opinion were more closely matched than males, however this was evident for respondents 41—50 years old Fig 2. For example, although a female respondent experienced a long review of 60 weeks, she expects a long review to take just over 20 weeks [ Based on researcher experience and generalizing for all ages, those who identify as male appear to be the least satisfied with the speed of the peer-review process.
Nevertheless, this finding is important for editors who may feel confused as to the sort of delays in time before authors begin contacting them. This review duration for a potential withdrawal of a manuscript is over double the average time that respondents perceive as slow, indicating that most authors had been quite patient with the peer review process.
Despite their apparent patience, respondents generally believe that long reviews should be shorter than what they have experienced Fig 2 , indicating an overall perception that peer-review durations are too slow within the realm of conservation biology. In general, authors did not seem to believe there was any bias toward acceptance or rejection of their manuscript if they contacted the editor or whether the review period was quick or long.
Likert type questions revealed that in general, reviewer fatigue e. One respondent expressed this reviewer fatigue as follows:. While editors try to find suitable reviewers in practice there is a relatively small pool of reviewers who can be relied on to do useful reviews. I am an associate editor on 5 journals and am convinced that there is substantial reviewer fatigue out there as the number of publications has grown annually as have the number of journals.
This may correspond with the increased number of publications and publication outlets that contemporary scientists have to contend with.
Similarly, in , it was reported that over new papers appear daily in the scientific and medical literature alone, and this number is likely increasing rapidly [ 12 ].
Kumar [ 23 ] listed five reasons for publication delay, which included reviewer availability and reviewers having other commitments pushing manuscript reviews at the bottom of their list. The other three reasons included editors sending the manuscript for multiple rounds of reviews when reviews are conflicting or inadequate ; the journal has outsourced manuscript management e.
On the other hand, respondents perceived the persistence of the editorial team as a factor in somewhat speeding up the review process, as well as maximum allocated review times for each journal, and the journal prestige or impact factor Table 2 :.
I will always take the full amount of time they [editors] give me. Moreover , only once have I been asked to review a paper by an open access journal , which required my review submission in 2 weeks.
But all the others were non-open access journals that gave me a month or more , which increased the average time to decision.
We questioned participating authors on their perspectives of consequences of long or short review durations. Our findings indicate a number of consequences that we have grouped into themes below. Therefore, review time is an important consideration for journals to maintain reputation, as majority of respondents have given thought to review times when deciding what journal to submit to.
Although, there are some indications of trade-offs between review duration and impact factor as approximately 1 of 5 respondents consider journal prestige and impact factor as an influential part of deciding to which journal they should submit. Publication of research can ultimately affect society at large if the manuscript has significant scientific and policy implications. One respondent wrote:. As an early career researcher trying to build a list of publications , it is important to have papers reviewed quickly.
The longer the time lag between a research project and accepted publication the more difficult it is to apply for new grants or job opportunities. Furthermore, some respondents mentioned the delay in graduation or acceptance in graduate school for students due to lengthy peer-review processes:. I received the first response about my first article only after 54 weeks.
At that time I was not able to start my PhD because the institution only accepted candidates with at least one accepted article. Even after successful completion of my Ph. It seems that regardless of their experience, the review period cannot be short enough for early-career professionals who publish in conservation biology.
In addition, it seems that irrespective of age, respondents believe a lengthy review period should be considerably shorter than what they have experienced Fig 3. Publications are important for ranking of scientists and institution achievements so long reviews and long editorial process could violate this process. Intentional delay of review was also listed as 1 of 5 reasons for peer-review delay by Kumar [ 23 ], emphasizing some merit to this topic. For example:. I am sure in many cases that speeds up the process more so when people cite their friends the reviewers in these papers.
If a person has an "in" with the journal. In other words , subjectivity and preferential treatment increase speed. Others voiced concerns that a delay of a manuscript could hinder subsequent work that is built on the manuscript in review, and some mentioned challenges in remembering specifics of the study or content of the manuscript when review times are particularly long.
The frustration associated with a lengthy process discourages the writer. Incentives for conducting research are diminished when rewards are not forthcoming. Less incentive means less motivation which both translate into less productivity.
Less productivity means less likelihood for promotions. This in turn sets up a vicious cycle very similar to the one related to applying unsuccessfully for grants. A long peer review process reduces drastically your efficiency of publishing papers , because you need to go back to your previous work and you cannot focus on your current work.
This was a key paper needed to build a grant proposal , and my collaborators consistently asked if it was published yet—the grant was ultimately submitted before the paper was accepted. Although for the majority of the time, long review durations may not have dramatic consequences; however, lengthy review durations that occur at the wrong place at the wrong time may potentially lead to a cascade of consequences.
Research quality suffers—as opportunities to publish high quality research can be lost when other groups publish often lower quality research first. The focus then becomes speed and simplicity of research rather than quality.
When asked how the review process should be improved, participants provided open-ended responses summarized in Table 3. Editors should remove slow reviewers from their lists.
There should be a central bank where good reviewers receive benefits such as fast track review of their material if submitted to the same company e. Wiley , Elsevier , etc. Many journals mention their expected review times on their websites: for example, Elsevier states that most of its journals communicate decisions to authors within 4 months.
If your journal does not mention its expected review time, you can try checking previously published papers from the journal and see if they provide any statistics. Most journals mention the submission date, acceptance date, and date of publication for papers published online; the difference between the former two dates will give you the review time. In case your target journal does not give any indication of its review time and you have no way of finding out the status of your submission, I would urge you to be patient until at least 4 months have passed.
Thereafter, there should be no harm in you writing a polite reminder email to the journal editor asking when you can expect a decision or an update on the status of the manuscript. Most journal editors are or have been researchers themselves and would be well familiar with the anxiety an author faces waiting to hear from the journal after manuscript submission.
You can frame your email along the lines of the one below. We have not received an update regarding the status of our manuscript in the review process. Could you let us know when we can expect notice regarding the decision of the editorial board?
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to hearing from you. I hope this helps and that you receive a response from the journal editor soon. Good luck!
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