Trade-off between urgency and reduced editorial capacity affect publication speed in ecological and medical journals during 2020

Lucas Rodriguez Forti · Luiz Solino · Judit K. Szabo

27 citations0/0 files storedHumanities and Social Sciences Communications

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Academic Publishing and Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Communication Academic Writing and Publishing

Abstract

Abstract While the speed of publication in academic journals has decreased over time, delays in the review process can still cause frustration and damage the authors’ career. During the COVID-19 lockdown, scientists struggled to manage tasks and academic journals announced possible publication delays due to reduced editorial capacity. In this context, COVID-19 research has been somewhat paradoxical, due to societal and editorial pressures for fast publication. We hypothesised that given the urgency of disseminating pandemic-related information, articles on the topic would be published as a priority in 2020. We analysed the submission-to-publication time lag for 5790 articles published between January 1, 2018 and December 31, 2020 in eight ecology and eight medical journals. We also analysed patterns in the gender of first and last authors. All 16 journals were international, with relatively high impact factor (between 2.34 and 36.13) and partially or fully open access. Even though articles in general took longer to get published, the speed of publication increased in 2020, as the faster review of 419 COVID-19 articles compensated for the longer submission-to-publication time lag of non-COVID-19 publications. Manuscripts in journals with a higher impact factor and only partial open access took longer to get published during the last three years. In 2020, the ratio of articles with male and female first and last authors remained similar to that in 2019, maintaining the gender bias in scientific productivity. Female scientists, especially when they are providing maternity and other primary care, need more support for their careers, such as relief from teaching duties and adjustments on assessment criteria to access research funding. We advocate that topics besides COVID-19, particularly those that could help to solve other urgent crises, should also benefit from faster publication.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

References

2007Effect size, confidence interval and statistical significance: a practical guide for biologists 2013Bibliometrics: Global gender disparities in science 2020COVID‐19 and the gender gap in work hours 2012Predatory publishers are corrupting open access 2020Unequal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientists 2020Impact of COVID-19 on the social, economic, environmental and energy domains: Lessons learnt from a global pandemic 2000The Slowdown of the Economics Publishing Process 2016Trends and comparison of female first authorship in high impact medical journals: observational study (1994-2014)

Cited by

2023The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gender gap in research productivity within academia 2023The impact of COVID-19 on global health journals: an analysis of impact factor and publication trends

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.