Manuscript Submission Timelines

A lot of things about the VAMP-seq project felt like it took forever, and the manuscript submission & peer review process did not feel like an exception. While waiting, I wondered what my “normal” experience with paper submission & peer review was, and decided to comb through my emails to find how long each stage of the process took. I’m listing the results here, at least for the papers I feel comfortable showing (mostly papers where I felt I was the (or one of the) primary contributor(s)).

 

It’s a pretty variable process but I’m guessing the general timelines should be roughly applicable to most paper submission in the biomedical sciences.

Some additional notes:
1) I don’t necessary think paper submissions processes are getting slower; the “trend” in my data likely has more to do with this particular (relatively small) set of samples.
2) Looking back on it, all of these papers got accepted in the first place we submitted. I’m guessing the process could certainly look different if we had to sequentially submit to numerous journals (and / or had initially gotten reviewed just to be rejected).