Authoring a PhD

Time lags
.
Journal publishing is a game of many parts. First
the editors send your paper out to their required number of 
referees. These people then sit on it for a certain period before
responding, usually taking six weeks to three months, even for
an efficiently run journal. In many fields responses can drag on
much longer, up to four to six months, because scrupulous 
editors have to collect in sufficient comments to make a deci-
sion, which always takes longer than a single reference. Next
the editors have to work though their in-tray of refereed sub-
missions and decide how to respond to your paper in the light
of the comments and scores, which usually takes several weeks,
adding perhaps another month. Once your article is accepted
without further substantive revisions, then it goes into a publi-
cation queue. Time lags from acceptance to publication in jour-
nals are almost always at least 6 months, and probably average
around 12 months. Good journals will also publish their statis-
tics in an annual report, either on their Web site or in the jour-
nal pages itself. Most reputable journals now indicate when
papers were accepted, and some will give details of how long
the editorial process took.
The main trouble is that journal editors and publishers are
often risk-averse people who like to maintain a ‘bank’ of
accepted articles as a safeguard against running out of copy.
Some editors accept many more articles than they can feasibly
publish, and so create a backlog problem. In some pathological
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cases the editors of highly prestigious journals can create a time
lag from acceptance to publication which is up to 30 months or
even three years. This approach makes a complete mockery of
any journal’s role to provide swift, lively and contemporaneous
feedback to their academic profession. At the other extreme
there are hand-to-mouth journals which only get by through
their editors constantly living on their wits, acquiring papers at
conferences, and so on. Here the copy for the very next issue
may be problematic, so if your paper arrives at an opportune
moment the editors may bend over backwards to accept it and
publish it quickly. This might seem a good result for you, but
only if the journal has a significant circulation and has main-
tained its quality reputation despite copy shortages.
In addition to these major influences on the long-run standing
of journals, there are a further four shorter-term or less important
influences on how journals are seen by the profession. These fac-
tors may not matter so much for the most-cited journals. But for
all other titles they are worth considering because they help to
differentiate the middle mass of journals one from another.