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In my field, good journals often seem to take around 12-20 weeks to review papers. As was suggested in a previous post, "How is it in my best interest not to submit a paper to two journals simultaneously?," one should not submit same paper to two journals. But none is omniscient to do multiple papers on various topics. Can any one kindly suggest how to speed up the publication process? Can journals reduce time? Or is this suggestion acceptable only after acceptance?

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    Good journals take around 12-20 weeks to review papers. This is very field dependent. In some fields, the norm is as short as a month (or less!). Some fields primarily rely on conferences instead of journals, which generally have very short turnaround times (and limits the concurrency issue).
    – Roger Fan
    Commented Jun 1, 2015 at 19:13
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    Could you please say what field you are in?
    – jakebeal
    Commented Jun 1, 2015 at 19:15
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    There is one easy solution: lower your journal standards. There are plenty of journals that will publish your work in a few days for a fee. Now this is assuming you are solely interested in publishing as fast as possible, not things like advancing Human knowledge in your field or preparing a strong faculty application for a reputable institution.
    – Cape Code
    Commented Jun 1, 2015 at 20:09
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    @RogerFan The (theoretical) computer science conference review cycle takes 2.5–3 months (≈10-13 weeks) from submission to acceptance/rejection. Add another 1.5 months (≈6 weeks) to submit the camera-ready version, and yet another 2–3 months (≈10-13 weeks) for the proceedings to be published (when the conference starts). The conference I submit to most often meets in mid-June; its submission deadline is at the end of November.
    – JeffE
    Commented Jun 1, 2015 at 20:19
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    In pure mathematics, you can wait a year (or two, or more!) for some good journals to review your paper.
    – Lazzaro Campeotti
    Commented Jun 1, 2015 at 20:37

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If I'm understanding correctly, the problem you're concerned about is what to do when you've just submitted a paper, and now you have a long wait before you can submit the follow-up paper. Your question then presumes that a good solution to this problem is to try to accelerate the publication process.

I think that is a bad assumption. There is no reason that you need to be stalled on your forward progress just because a paper is under review. Here are two good alternatives that work within the system.

  1. You can continue directly building on the same direction. If you get to a major milestone and are ready to submit a new paper before the previous one is finished reviewing, you can submit a paper citing the one under review as "submitted," and include the draft paper as supplementary review-only information.
  2. Research typically has a lot of "branching path" options getting catalogued in your "future work" sections. Why not take a secondary path that you've wanted to investigate but isn't in the same exactly line of progression as the paper currently under review? That will likely lead to its own interesting results that can be published without dependency on the paper currently under review.

It also seems possible to me that this concern may have arisen due to trying to publish too incrementally. If you cluster your work into larger "publication units" the time lag will likely be less problematic and a smaller number of significant papers is generally better for your career than a bunch of little incremental papers that nobody cares about.

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  • Thank you all for caring about my concern. My field is Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. @capecode : If I pay fees and get published in some lower level journals, if work is genuine and article is nice should be fine, but how do the fraternity takes it? And an additional question : can any reference be cited if I publish my works in blog?
    – Searcher
    Commented Jun 2, 2015 at 19:05
  • @Searcher my comment was sarcastic. I think you shouldn't worry about how fast you publish.
    – Cape Code
    Commented Jun 9, 2015 at 5:12

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