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I have a mathematics paper ready for publishing, but I can't decide to which journal should I publish it.
The main thing based on which I want to publish the paper to a specific journal is its short period of peer-review process (because I need to publish it as soon as possible).
Suppose I have a list of journals I want to publish the paper. How should I know the average period of peer-review process for each of them?
n.b. I think this answer is more relevant outside of mathematics, which is the OP's field ...
Although @Thomas's answer is correct that most journals to which you could submit your paper will be sharing the same reviewer pool, there can be big differences between journals in how efficiently their editorial processes run and, importantly, how much they pressure authors to return reviews quickly.
We are committed to providing an efficient service for both authors and readers. Our team of independent editors make rapid and fair publication decisions.
Obviously that doesn't give you anything hard and fast, but it does at least tell you that they prioritize speed.
someone has done an analysis of publication delays based on data from PubMed (Zenodo repository here). The linked blog post has a dynamic graphic window that lets you select specific journals, but some caveats:
The other point I made in my previous answer about rapid peer review is that depending on your situation, it might not be as important as you think to have your paper published; in many cases, submission to a reputable journal counts for almost as much as publication - it indicates to potential admissions committees, employers, etc. that your work is actually ready for prime time (as opposed to "in prep", which can mean anything from "I've got a good idea" to "submitting tomorrow"). Depending on journal policies etc. within your field, you could also consider posting your paper to a pre-print service such as ArXiv - another way of convincing people that your work is for real.
The best way to figure out the true importance of rapid publication for your situation is probably to talk to a senior colleague in your field who knows your situation.
For publishing in mathematics you could check out the AMS' Backlog of Mathematics Research Journals. Among other things it provides a current estimate of waiting time between submission and publication and historical data for the time between submission and final acceptance.
I'd personally take these estimates with a grain of salt, but I suppose if you're desperate it's better than nothing.
This is more of a comment, but it needs to be said:
The length of the peer review process depends on the reviewers. If the reviewers are slow, there is little the journal can do about it beyond some reminder emails.
Ultimately, all the journals will be asking the same set of people to review your paper. So don't expect that one journal will really be much faster than another.
Conferences can present a faster publication route because they have a schedule to keep. However, reviewing speed often comes at the cost of quality.
Many papers in many journal have submission dates and acceptance dates right at the top of the article pdf. In the example depicted, this info is right below the author info. The publication dats at the top.
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This won't give you an average, but a fairly quick sampling of your target journals should provide you with "typical" information. As an aside, you're probably most interested in the acceptance dates, the point at which you can list a paper as "In Press" on your CV.
Unless the journal makes the data public, there's no way to tell. That's because the information needed isn't publicly available.
The speed of the peer review process depends on a few things:
When you say you want to know the average period of the "peer review process", it's not clear what you're actually looking for.
In any case the variance in the peer review times is very large. If the average is 30 days, you could still easily get a decision after 90 days.
Honestly, I would not worry about this because it's just not something you can get good data on, and it's not clear how the data is going to help you anyway. It's like attempting to predict whether a coin flip is going to end up heads or tails, and someone offers to tell you what the results of the previous 100 trials were: sure you can get the data, but it's not helpful in predicting what the next trial's results are going to be.
I may be completely wrong but I think, based upon the nature of our research topic, we first should select the appropriate right fit journal and then should start the research paper writing process. This will help our ideas, writing process, references , writing style , level of detail s we need to integrate etc aligned well ahead of the time.
