17 Mar 2014 danstowell   » (Journeyer)

How long it takes to get my articles published - update

Here's an update to my own personal data about how long it takes to get academic articles published. I've also augmented it with funding applications too, to compare how long all these decisions take in academia.

It's important because often, especially as an early-career researcher, if it takes one year for a journal article to come out (even after the reviewers have said yes), that's one year of not having it on your CV.

So how long do the different bits take? Here's a bar-chart summarising the mean durations in my data:

The data is divided into 3 sections: first, writing up until first submission; then, reviewing (including any back-and-forth with reviewers, resubmission etc); then finally, the time from final decision through to publication.

Firstly note that there are not many data points here, so for example I have one journal article that took an extremely long time after acceptance to actually appear, and this skews the average. But it's certainly notable that the time spent writing generally is dwarfed by the time spent waiting. And particularly that it's not necessarily the reviewing process itself that forces us all to wait - various admin things such as typesetting seem to take at least as long. Whether or not things should take that long, well, it's up to you to decide.

Also - I was awarded a fellowship recently, which is great - but you can see in the diagram, that I spent about two years repeatedly getting negative funding decisions. It's tough!

This is just my own data - I make no claims to generality.

Syndicated 2014-03-17 15:23:03 (Updated 2014-03-19 09:11:29) from Dan Stowell

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