How long nature review

How long did it take : " My paper took more than a year from submission to acceptance. The wait that felt the longest was the two months' delay between submission and the initial comments.

A typical timeline for my field is about one to two weeks for editorial decisions and two to three weeks for referee comments.

The resubmission process took an additional 10 months, because we were requested to expand the scope of the study by performing more experiments. How it affected me : "The additional experiments we did were useful for the bio-adhesion community, but this delay occurred when I was transitioning between my graduate and postdoctoral studies, which is a critical time to compete for fellowships and jobs.

The uncertainty was stressful. I had dedicated numerous hours to this work, and was unsure about whether I would be rewarded if my paper was not accepted in time for specific competitions. What could be better : "Editors could consider writing short statements when young researchers apply for jobs, or give awards 'certifying' that a paper is under review and is of broad perceived interest.

What happened : " My paper took about eight months from submission to first decision. The typical peer-review time for this journal is three to four months. My sense is that the journal had difficulty finding appropriate reviewers because my research topic on migration and urban diversity in Southeast Asia was just gaining traction at that time. How it affected me : "The wait was long, but the editor was supportive, and his inputs sharpened my argument.

Although I was unable to submit my manuscript for consideration elsewhere during the review period, the journal is highly regarded in my field. They may not send in their review within the agreed-on time frame, or they may send in a review that does nothing more than state a general opinion of the work without justifying that opinion, whether positive or negative. This is not to say that we as editors are always blameless or are incapable of making a poor decision on a manuscript. In our experience, however, manuscripts are usually delayed because of a single reviewer.

We are probably preaching to the choir when we say that it is essential that reviews be received in a timely manner so the authors of the manuscript can either modify their manuscript or take it to another journal should it be deemed by the reviewers' comments and editorial judgment to be inappropriate for our pages. What hangs in the balance is not just publication of a single paper for a lab.

Labs are made up of people who rely on their publication record for grants, graduation and job prospects. When a potential reviewer is overstretched in his or her commitments, review of a manuscript is probably the first commitment set aside.

Though it is inconvenient for editors, this tardiness is unlikely to affect publication of Nature Genetics. It is actually the author—perhaps at a key stage in his or her career—who will be most affected by significant delay. Grants can be denied, graduation delayed, job opportunities squandered, all as a result of delays in the process, and we need not discuss the 's' word in detail scooped.

Although it might seem melodramatic to put it in such severe terms, it is a reality that many authors face. We as editors would prefer not to act as police, reminding referees of their obligations; unfortunately, time that could be devoted to assessing manuscripts is frequently pirated by this activity. By committing to referee a paper, you are not only advising the editors on whether to accept or reject, you are providing authors with useful suggestions to improve their research. It is an integral part of the process that, when unfulfilled, further undermines the system of checks and balances.

Often, referees will provide a very general impression of the work presented in a manuscript without justifying their view. In the rejection, they mentioned that their contacted Nature medicine editors and they suggested the transference to that journal. Motivation: I believe the quality of the reviews could have been much higher.

Nature is a journal that requires the highest quality and standard for it's submissions in order to be sent out to review. Once it is sent out, the editors should, in my opinion, adhere to the same highest standard when judging the quality of the reviews. Motivation: The paper was quickly rejected because the editor felt that it was not a fundamental advance in our understanding.

I got the option to submit to the sister journal of Nature Climate Change. Motivation: In this case, we do not feel that your paper has matched our criteria for further consideration. While we have no doubt that your findings will be of significant interest to fellow specialists, I regret that we are unable to conclude that the paper contains the sort of advance in our understanding of We instead feel that the present paper would find a more appropriate outlet in another journal.

Although we are unable to offer to publish your paper in Nature, you may wish to consider Nature Communications as an outlet for your research if so, please see the link below. Nature Communications is, however, editorially independent and therefore I can't guarantee that they would find your manuscript appropriate for their journal.

Motivation: I found 3 weeks quite a long time to wait just to find out whether the paper would be reviewed or not. However, I was encouraged to transfer my paper to a different Nature brand journal, and the transfer process was extremely easy and convenient.

Motivation: In general, the manuscript was processed fast, so the editorial process is quite well organized. But the choose of reviewers was very terrible.

Only 1 of 3 referees did really understood the main concepts of the work reported, thus gave relevant comments and asked questions.

Last year, Chris Hartgerink, a behavioural-sciences graduate student at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, ran an analysis of the Public Library of Science PLOS family of journals since the first one launched in He chose the journals largely because they make the data easily accessible, and because he was waiting for a paper to be published in PLoS ONE.

He found that the mean review time had roughly doubled in the past decade, from 50— days to — days, depending on the journal see go. And when Royle looked at eight journals that had published cell-biology papers over the past decade, he found that publication times had lengthened at seven of them, mostly because review times had stretched out.

One contention is that peer reviewers now ask for more. When Ron Vale, a cell biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, analysed biology papers that had been published in Cell , Nature and the Journal of Cell Biology , in the first six months of and compared that with the same period in , he found that both the average number of authors and the number of panels in experimental figures rose by 2—4 fold 5.

This showed, he argued, that the amount of data required for a publication had gone up, and Vale suspects that much of the added data come from authors trying to meet reviewers' demands. Scientists grumble about overzealous critics who always seem to want more, or different, experiments to nail a point. His analysis of his group's publication times showed that almost 4 months of the average 9-month gestation was spent revising papers for resubmission.

Many scientists also blame journal editors, who, they say, can be reluctant to provide clear guidance and decisions to authors when reviews are mixed — unnecessarily stringing out the review and revision process. Journal heads disagree, and say that their editors are accomplished at handling mixed reviews. Cell editor-in-chief Emilie Marcus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that editors at her journal take responsibility for publication decisions and help authors to map out a plan for revisions.

Technological advances mean that research now involves handling more and more data, editors say, and there is greater emphasis on making that information available to the community. She acknowledges that PLoS ONE 's publication time has risen; one factor is that the volume of papers has, too — from in to 30, per year now — and it takes time to find and assign appropriate editors and reviewers. PLOS used 76, reviewers in Another, says Kiermer, is that the number of essential checkpoints — including competing-interest disclosures, animal-welfare reports and screens for plagiarism — have increased in the past decade.

Himmelstein found that the number of papers in PubMed more than doubled between and , reaching nearly 1 million articles. Digital publishing may have had benefits in shortening 'production' time — the time from acceptance to publication — rather than time in review. In Himmelstein's analysis, time spent in production has halved since the early s, falling to a stable median of 25 days.

Several new journals and online publishing platforms have promised to speed up the process even more. PeerJ, a family of journals that launched in , is one of several that now encourage open peer review, in which reviewers' names and comments are posted alongside articles. The hope is that the transparency will prevent unnecessary delays or burdensome revision requests from reviewers. The biomedical and life-sciences journal eLife launched in with a pledge to make initial editorial decisions within a few days and to review papers quickly.

Reviewers get strict instructions not to suggest the 'perfect experiment', and they can ask for extra analysis only if it can be completed within 2 months. Otherwise, the paper is rejected. Randy Schekman, a cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor-in-chief of eLife , says that these policies mean that more than two-thirds of the journal's accepted papers undergo just one round of review. In a analysis, Himmelstein created a ranking by the median review time for all 3, journals that had papers with time stamps in the PubMed database from January to June see go.

PeerJ had a relatively fast time: 74 days after submission. By comparison, Cell 's review time was days; Nature 's was days; PLoS Medicine took days; and Developmental Cell was among the slowest of the popular biomedical journals, at days. Marcus notes that comparison between journals is difficult because the publications define received, revised and accepted days differently, and that Developmental Cell places a high priority on timely review.

One way for biologists to accelerate publication is by embracing preprints. These allow work to quickly receive credit and critique, says Bruno Eckhardt, associate editor of Physical Review E and a theoretical physicist at the University of Marburg in Germany. A preprint submitted to bioRxiv — a server run by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York — is published online within 24 hours and given a digital object identifier DOI ; subsequent revisions are time-stamped and anyone can read and comment on the paper.

What's more, proponents say, preprint publishing can simply be added onto the conventional publication process. FResearch , which launched in , does this by publishing papers first, then inviting open peer review and revision. Some scientists are going a step further, and using platforms such as GitHub, Zenodo and figshare to publish each hypothesis, data collection or figure as they go along.

Each file can be given a DOI, so that it is citable and trackable. Himmelstein, who already publishes his papers as preprints, has been using the Thinklab platform to progressively write up and publish the results of a new project since January Or is it better to do what is fastest and most efficient to get your research out there?

But preprints and real-time digital publishing platforms are no panacea. And even after preprint publishing, scientists can still find themselves slogging through peer review and chasing high-impact journals for a final publication to adorn their CV. Vosshall says that the scientific community relies on conventional journals to serve as a 'prestige filter' so that important papers are brought to the attention of the right readers.

When the paper was finally published after its almost-two-year wait, she got positive responses, she says. It has been viewed nearly 2, times, had 51 shares on Facebook and Twitter and got downloads. The publication also helped her to secure her current position — as a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. Still, the whole process is not something she wants to endure again — so these days, she tends to send her papers to mid-range journals that are likely to publish her work right away.