When it comes to choosing where to send their next paper, researchers weigh many factors, but one of the most crucial is often overlooked: journal turnaround time. This is the time it takes a journal to move from manuscript submission to publication (or acceptance). Despite its importance, finding reliable data on journal turnaround times can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. That is changing, though, thanks to a new partnership between Scholarly Intelligence and Researcher.Life by Editage, which aims to shed light on these opaque statistics.
Understanding the Importance of Speed in Publishing
In the world of research, timing can be everything. Being able to quickly share findings can accelerate a researcher’s influence and academic progress.
Survey after survey shows that swift publication turnaround time is a top priority for scholars. In a 2015 survey by Springer Nature, 76% of STM researchers considered a journal’s speed (‘time from submission to first decision’) very important or quite important when selecting a journal to submit their latest paper.
More recently, in a 2019 survey by Taylor & Francis, 64% of researchers gave a score of 1 or 2 (scale from 1 to 5 where 1 stood for ‘Very important’ and 5 for ‘Not at all important’) to speed (‘short decision turnaround times’) when choosing where to publish their work.
Providing more nuance, just over half (51%) of the respondents in an Editage survey in 2018 suggested that ideally it should take no longer than three months from submission to publication.
Decoding ‘Journal Turnaround Time’
So, what exactly do we mean by ‘journal turnaround time’? This metric measures the span from when a paper is submitted to when it becomes available to the public. So far so good. Yet, this timeframe can vary widely depending on a publisher’s (or portfolio’s) operational efficiency and a journal’s specific characteristics, such as its discipline, selectivity, size, ownership, and so on.
For example, when it comes to operational efficiency, MDPI stands out among large publishers for achieving a journal turnaround time of 40 days. This is more than 100 days faster than the large, traditional publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis) as well as a collection of mid-size publishers (Frontiers, Sage, Wolters Kluwer, ACS, OUP, RSC, and IOP).
Going a step further, the publishing time varies significantly by discipline. For example, when excluding MDPI, journals in Education typically take about 110 days longer to publish papers than journals in Mechanical Engineering that in turn take about 75 days longer than journals in Organic Chemistry. More broadly, disciplines in Social Sciences and Humanities are typically slower than disciplines in Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics that in turn tend to be slower than disciplines in Science.
A New Era of Transparency with Researcher.Life and Scholarly Intelligence
Until recently, researchers did not have easy access to information about journal turnaround times. Several databases offer information about journal citability, but none showed data about publishing time. Publisher websites occasionally offer information about turnaround times, but the metrics shown are incomplete and inconsistent.
Enter Researcher.Life and Scholarly Intelligence. Their partnership is pioneering transparency in journal turnaround times. By integrating Scholarly Intelligence’s data into Researcher.Life’s Journal Finder tool, they’re equipping academics with the first-ever platform to offer detailed insights into journal turnaround time.
The Journal Finder tool now hosts turnaround time information for nearly 8,000 journals that account for the majority of scholarly articles published every year. It includes titles from Elsevier, Springer Nature, MDPI, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Frontiers, Sage, Wolters Kluwer, ACS, OUP, RSC, and IOP, covering a wide range of disciplines.
Researchers can use the Journal Finder tool to search for journals with the option to filter results not only by citability metrics or scope but also by how quickly they publish. This can mean the difference between publishing their work in a few weeks and publishing it in several months, lest they opt for preprint servers or poorly reputed rapid publishers. Moreover, researchers can see a distribution for a journal’s turnaround time performance, as in the example below for the journal Scientific Reports by Springer Nature.
In line with our expectations, journal turnaround time proves to be a highly sought after metric. Preliminary results reveal that journal turnaround time is already one of the most popular metrics on the Researcher.Life platform.
Going forward, the Journal Finder tool will expand its coverage, incorporating additional journals and publishers, and it will provide refined turnaround time information with a split between the reviewing process (from submission to acceptance) and the production process (from acceptance to publication), offering researchers additional opportunities to make informed decisions. Moreover, the data will soon be updated with the latest journal performance from late 2023 and early 2024.
Conclusion
The partnership between the two organizations represents a significant step in addressing the lack of transparency in journal turnaround times. It empowers researchers in making informed decisions when choosing to submit their papers by providing them with a range of valuable insights into journal performance from citability to scope and processing speed. With this, Scholarly Intelligence and Researcher.Life by Editage aim to set a new standard for openness and transparency in scholarly publishing, which will revolutionize how researchers choose where to publish their work.
Christos Petrou
Founder and Chief Analyst at Scholarly Intelligence
Christos is a former analyst of the Web of Science Group at Clarivate Analytics and the Open Access portfolio at Springer Nature. A geneticist by training, he previously worked in agriculture and as a consultant for A.T. Kearney, and he holds an MBA from INSEAD.
