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I would like to firstly state that I do understand the essence of the reviewing process in scientific publications.

I have submitted my article to a material-science relating journal. The first round of revision was very fast; it took less than 10 days. One of two referees suggested a minor revision while the other asked for a moderate amount of questions.

Currently, it takes 3 weeks after two reviewers agreed to make the second round of reviewing.

Thus, is it common that the second (and later) reviewing process require more time as long as the first one?

P.S. Editor privately informed that they are same referees.

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    I'm not sure how it is in that science, but 3 weeks is a very short time in general. Actually, I would consider 10 days as a miracle! Remember that people can easily be out for 3 weeks straight, or loaded with whatever for 3 weeks straight (like at my university, where the state exams last for 2 weeks sometimes).
    – yo'
    Commented Sep 17, 2015 at 20:53

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In my experience, it is usually the other way around. The first round of reviews typically takes longer, because the reviewers are new to the paper and first reading it and forming their opinions. In the second round, they are more likely to be simply looking at differences and seeing whether they agree with your adjustments and replies to their comments.

There is, however, a lot of noise in the process, because in most cases the main amount of time is not spent in reviewing per se, but rather in waiting for the reviewers to make time in their schedules to review. It differs from journal to journal of course, but sounds to me like in your first round of review you got unusually lucky with the reviewers' schedules and things went very fast, and the second round of review is taking a more "normal" length of time.

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    Thank you very much for the advise. I am very anxious since this is my first publication on a full-length research paper (I have got one publication as a short letter with fast review process.)
    – user987124
    Commented Sep 18, 2015 at 2:58
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To add to jakebeal's answer, the second (and later) rounds of reviewing are usually faster not just because the reviewers have already seen the paper, but also because the reviewers are less likely to not submit a review. A lot of the variance in the time taken is because reviewers decline to review, do not submit a review by the deadline, and so on, which forces the editors to invite new reviewers and start the clock from scratch. But after they've already reviewed a paper once they are more likely to agree to review again as well as submit a review before the deadline.

Also, many of the journals I've seen have set things up so that the deadline for the first round of review is slightly longer than the deadline for the second and further rounds - by about 25%.

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