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

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.

Publishing trends of journals and articles in Journal Citation Reports during the COVID-19 pandemic: a descriptive study

“…The percentage of OA articles related to COVID-19 was nearly 50%. In order to end the pandemic, publishers endeavored in several ways to help academics rapidly develop vaccines and treatments, including expanding OA publishing, rapid peer review of articles (most COVID-19 articles were published faster than the journals' average [10]), and article processing charge (APC) discounts for some jour-nals. These collaborative international responses between the publishing industry and academia contributed to the rapid distribution of research information.…”

Business as usual? Taking stock of submissions and reviews two years after the first coronavirus lockdowns

“…However, they persist when controlling the general overrepresentation of male scholars in these domains and can also be observed in specific fields within the social sciences, such as economics and finance (Amano- Patiño et al, 2020;Kruger et al, 2020). Yet there are some smaller-scale ad-hoc investigations by journal editors or leaders of scientific associations into the papers submitted to specific journals which have shown no gender-related changes during the pandemic (Biondi et al, 2021;Dolan & Lawless, 2020;Forti et al, 2021;Fox & Meyer, 2021)-or a limited and conditioned change that only applied to single authorship (Dolan & Lawless, 2020).…”

“…While machine learning-based tools for the generic determination of gender on the basis of first names exist and have shown a satisfactory level of reliability for massive data sets (Sebo, 2021), we have opted to research and code scholars’ gender individually by student assistants to optimize the reliability in our limited sample. These searches drew on publicly available data (such as pictures or short bios) that could be found on scholars’ institutional profiles and other websites (e.g., Forti et al, 2021) 1 .…”

Experiences of WNGER II Ph.D. Fellows During the COVID-19 Pandemic – A Case Study

“…Therefore, it seems like many journals within educational sciences and health sciences have experienced their scholars either refusing to review articles or asking for more time than usual; thus, review processes, in turn, may take longer than usual as a consequence of the pandemic. Another part of this issue is whether female PhDs' submission rates to scientific journals have decreased as a consequence of COVID-19, considering that women statistically have more childcare, household, and other responsibilities during lockdowns, including home schooling (see, e.g., Forti et al, 2021). This is also related to some other preliminary tendencies (Abdellatif and Gatto, 2020;Bal et al, 2020), indicating that PhDs with children (and other caretaking responsibilities) may be particularly vulnerable regarding their Ph.D. progress during COVID-19.…”