Editorial and publication delay of papers submitted to 14 selected Food Research journals. Influence of online posting

The final version of the paper is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1823-8 (www.springerlink.com)[Introduction] Publication delay, chronological distance between completion of a scientific work and distribution of its achievements as a peer reviewed paper, is a negative phenomenon in scientific information dissemination. It can be further subdivided in successive stages corresponding to the peer review process and the technical preparation of accepted manuscripts. Formal online posting in electronic versions of journals has been considered as a shortening of the process.[Objectives] To determine publication delay in a group of leading Food Research journals, as well as factors affecting this lag and also to compute the effect of formal online posting on the distribution of papers in electronic form. Secondary objective is also to study the possible effect of informal posting of papers through some repositories on the publication delay in the field.[Methods] 14 Food Research journals were selected and 4836 papers published in 2004 were examined. Dates of first submission, submission of revised manuscripts, acceptation, online posting and final publication were recorded for each paper.[Analysis] Data collected were analyzed using SPSS and SigmaPlot. Parametric correlation between some variables was determined and ANOVA was performed with BMDP package for significance analysis of differences among journals.[Results] Average publication delay of papers submitted to the set of selected journals is 348 ± 104 days, with European Food Research and Technology and Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry showing the shortest delays. Total delay strongly depends on the peer review process. On average, 85.75 % of manuscripts are corrected prior to their acceptance by journals. Online posting of papers prior to their print publication reduces total delay in about 29 %. On average, a paper is posted online 260 days after its submission to the set of journals.[Conclusions] Publication delay of papers is strongly dependent on the peer review process, which affects most of the manuscripts in the Food Research field. Advanced online publication through formal posting at the editor’s sites only slightly reduces the time between reception and final publication of papers.Peer reviewe

Searching for temporal patterns in the time series of publications of authors in a research specialty

In this paper we report results of our investigation of temporal patterns in the publication activity of authors in a research specialty. We base our analysis on Web of Science data for a field in the physical and chemical sciences from 1991‐2012. We determine the research groups in the field by clustering the co‐author network and generate our sample for this analysis by selecting the most productive author of each co‐author cluster to represent the activity of that group. Whereas a statistical time series analysis did not reveal any specific patterns, a time series clustering approach generated a grouping of time series that correlates with the structural network position (‘node role') of the respective authors in the clustered co‐author network. This work is part of a long‐term research project employing a mix of qualitative and network analytic methods to investigate field‐specific differences in collaborative patterns.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111080/1/meet14505101039.pd

The publishing delay in scholarly peer-reviewed journals

Publishing in scholarly peer reviewed journals usually entails long delays from submission to publication. In part this is due to the length of the peer review process and in part because of the dominating tradition of publication in issues, earlier a necessity of paper-based publishing, which creates backlogs of manuscripts waiting in line. The delays slow the dissemination of scholarship and can provide a significant burden on the academic careers of authors. Using a stratified random sample we studied average publishing delays in 2700 papers published in 135 journals sampled from the Scopus citation index. The shortest overall delays occur in science technology and medical (STM) fields and the longest in social science, arts/humanities and business/economics. Business/economics with a delay of 18 months took twice as long as chemistry with a 9 month average delay. Analysis of the variance indicated that by far the largest amount of variance in the time between submission and acceptance was among articles within a journal as compared with journals, disciplines or the size of the journal. For the time between acceptance and publication most of the variation in delay can be accounted for by differences between specific journals

Modeling Time-to-Acceptance for ISI-Indexed Journals in the Profession of Library and Information Science

There are many factors affecting review duration after a paper has been submitted to a journal. Developing a time-to-acceptance model of each journal for the whole time span from submission to acceptance can help researchers when they are selecting journals to publish research results, as well as help editors when they are optimizing workflow and strategy. Using ISI-indexed journals in the profession of library and information science as an example, this study aims to explore the possible patterns of time-to-acceptance for refereed articles. Based on the theories of maximum likelihood estimation, this article models probability distributions for the retrieved data through the R package fitdistrplus. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is further used to determine if the distribution for each journal can be accepted