The length it takes from submission to publication

The other day I received a positive comment about my housing demolition paper. It made me laugh abit inside — it felt like I finished that work so long ago it was talking about history. That paper was not so ancient though, I submitted it 8/4/17, went through one round of revision, and I got the email from Jean McGloin for conditional acceptance on 1/16/18. It then came online first a few months later (3/15/18), and is in the current print issue of JRCD, which came out in May 2018.

This ignores the time it takes from conception to finishing a project (we started the project sometime in 2015), but focusing just on the publishing process this is close to the best case scenario for the life-cycle of a paper through peer reviewed journals in criminology & criminal justice. The realist best case scenario typically is:

• Submission
• Wait 3 months for peer reviews
• Get chance to revise-resubmit
• Wait another 3 months for second round of reviews and editor final decision

So ignoring the time it takes for editors to make decisions and the time for you to turn around edits, you should not bank on a paper being accepted under 6 months. There are exceptions to this, some journals/editors don’t bother with the second three month wait period for reviewers to look at your revisions (which I think is the correct way to do it), and sometimes you will get reviews back faster or slower than three months, but that realist scenario is the norm for most journals in the CJ/Crim field. Things that make this process much slower (multiple rounds of revisions, editors taking time to make decisions, time it takes to make extensive revisions), are much more common than things that can make it go shorter (I’ve only heard myths about a uniform accept on the first round without revisions).

Not having tenure this is something that is on my mind. It is a bit of a rat race trying to publish all the papers expected of you, and due to the length of peer review times you essentially need to have your articles out and under review well before your tenure deadline is up. The six month lag is the best case scenario in which your paper is accepted at the first journal you submit to. The top journals are uber competitive though, so you often have to go through that process multiple times due to rejections.

So to measure that time I took my papers, including those not published, to see what this life-cycle time is. If I only included those that were published it would bias the results to make the time look shorter. Here I measured the time it took from submission of the original article until when I received the email of the paper being accepted or conditionally accepted. So I don’t consider the lag time at the end with copy-editing and publishing online, nor do I consider up front time from conception of the project or writing the paper. Also I include three papers that I am not shopping around anymore, and censored them at the date of the last reject. For articles still under review I censored them at 5/9/18.

So first, for 25 of my papers that have received one editorial decision, here is a graph of the typical number of rejects I get for each paper. A 0 for a paper means it was published at the first journal I submitted to, a 1 means I had one reject and was accepted at the second journal I submitted the paper to, etc. (I use "I" but this includes papers I am co-author on as well.) The Y axis shows the total percentage, and the label for each bar shows the total N.

So the proportion of papers of mine that are accepted on the first round is 28%, and I have a mean of 1.6 rejections per article. This does not take into account censoring (not sure how to for this estimate), and that biases the estimate of rejects per paper downward here, as it includes some articles under review now that will surely be rejected at some point after writing this blog post.

The papers with multiple rejects run the typical gamut of why academic papers are sometimes hard to publish. Null results, a hostile reviewer at multiple places, controversial findings. It also illustrates that peer review is not necessarily a beacon showing the absolute truth of an article. I’m pretty sure everything I’ve published, even papers accepted at the first venue, have had one reviewer with negative comments. You could find reasons to reject the findings of anything I write that has been peer reviewed — same as you can think many of my pre-print articles are correct or useful even though they do not currently have a peer review stamp of approval.

Most of those rejections add about three months to the life-cycle, but some can be fast (these include desk rejections), and some can be slower (rejections on later rounds of revisions). So using those begin times, end times, and taking into account censoring, I can estimate the typical survival time of my papers within the peer-review system when lumping all of those different factors together into the total time. Here is the 1 - survival chart, so can be interpreted as the number of days until publication. This includes 26 papers (one more that has not had a first decision), so this estimate does account for papers that are censored.

The Kaplan-Meier estimate of the median survival times for my papers is 290 days. So if you want a 50% chance of your article being published, you should expect 10 months based on my experience. The data is too sparse to estimate extreme quantiles, but say I want an over 80% probability of an article being published based on this data, how much time do I need? The estimate based on this data is at least 460 days.

Different strategies will produce different outcomes — so my paper survival times may not generalize to yours, but I think that estimate will be pretty reasonable for most folks in Crim/CJ. I try to match papers to journals that I think are the best fit (so I don’t submit everything to Criminology or Justice Quarterly at the first go), so I have a decent percent of papers that land on the first round. If I submitted first round to more mediocre journals overall my survival times would be faster. But even many mid-tiered journals in our field have overall acceptance rates below 10%, nothing I submit I ever think is really a slam dunk sure thing, so I don’t think my overall strategy is the biggest factor. Some of that survival time is my fault and includes time editing the article in between rejects and revise-resubmits, but the vast majority of this is simply waiting on reviewers.

So the sobering truth for those of us without tenure is that based on my estimates you need to have your journal articles out of the door well over a year before you go up for review to really ensure that your work is published. I have a non-trivial chunk of my work (near 20%) that has taken over one and a half years to publish. Folks currently getting their PhD it is the same pressure really, since to land a tenure track job you need to have publications as well. (It is actually one I think reasonable argument to take a longer time writing your dissertation.) And that is just for the publishing part — that does not include actually writing the article or conducting the research. The nature of the system is very much delayed gratification in having your work finally published.

Here is a link to the data on survival times for my papers, as well as the SPSS code to reproduce the analysis.