Hi-

Interesting papers cited in the previous posts!

I want to clarify the timing of received/accepted/published for scientific papers, as those are not at all unusual (in fact, the chronology for the Nature paper is pretty quick). 

“received” is when the paper is submitted by the authors. It is triaged by an editor at the journal, and may be immediately rejected due to lack of impact, lack of relevance etc. “Immediately” means under a week. If it is not rejected, it will go out for review, meaning that it is sent to 2 or 3 scientists (for Nature, nearly always 3) who have published in similar fields or using similar methods. Authors can exclude competing scientists and can recommend others in their field, as reviewers. (Editors check to make sure that suggested reviewers aren’t just the authors’ friends). 

It can take up to 2 months to get the reviews back, though the journals push the reviewers to return their writeups within 3-5 weeks. These reviewers are scientists with their own labs and their own grants and papers, and these reviews require a substantial amount of time to do—a good review will take at least half a day, usually more. After the reviews are back, the editor makes a decision based on the reviewers’ comments and recommendations. 

At this point the paper has a few possible fates: it can be accepted without revision (this is pretty much unheard of), rejected, or accepted with some number of revisions that the reviewers and editors specify. Typically, these are scientific clarifications, requests for more data etc, not grammar or spelling. Sometimes, these revisions are pretty extensive and will require more experiments. For Nature, which is a highly competitive journal, it’s not unusual to get reviews asking for a substantial number of experiments, more data collection, analysis etc. The authors have to do all of this, then incorporate their new data, with new figures, new text etc, and resubmit. This can take months to complete, or more, particularly if one of the lead authors has moved on to another position. The revised manuscript goes out for review again (usually to the same reviewers) and at that point is usually accepted unless the authors really missed something, in which case there may be more rounds of revisions. So this is the “accepted” date. After that, there are usually tweaks to figures, as the initially submitted figures often aren’t in a final, publishable form, and there are edits for grammar and spelling. Once those are approved, it gets published, giving you the last date.

Exceptionally long times from receipt to publication are usually due to lack of responsiveness from the authors (often due to a student or postdoc leaving the lab, so that followup experiments and analyses are difficult). Time from data collection to manuscript submission is completely up to the authors and may reflect complex and time-consuming analyses, lack of manpower, life events etc.

A journal’s interests lie in getting high-quality papers published as quickly as possible, so that they are still timely when they appear in print.

Bees have been a very hot topic in genetics and ecology research for more than 15 years. Getting bee-related papers published isn’t necessarily easier than other fields but there are certainly no roadblocks and no conspiracies. Any journal that would deliberately slow the rate of publication of a manuscript, just wouldn’t publish it at all and would reject it outright, not stall it and then publish it. That particular Nature paper was highlighted in the front section of the journal, which does not happen for all of the reports in every issue.

Sorry, pet peeve. But hopefully this is helpful.

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