average turn around time for top journals

[throwawayaeiou]

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does anyone know how long it *generally* takes for a paper to be peer-reviewed and accepted to high impact journals?

 

[PipetteDreams]

Highly depends on the field, journal, and extent of revisions being requested by the reviewers. Which journal and how high-impact? What type of publication (full length manuscript vs brief communication; microbio, computational, clinical, etc)?

Typically, 3-9 months is a reasonable window. SciRev crowdsources some of this info and may be useful.

 

[Goro]

does anyone know how long it *generally* takes for a paper to be peer-reviewed and accepted to high impact journals?

Could be up to a year.

You could have answered this question yourself by picking up a few copies of top journals and note the citations on the first pages the look like

Received x/x/2018,
Revised y/y/2018
Accepted z/z/2019.

 

[EdgeTrimmer]

Highly depends on the field, journal, and extent of revisions being requested by the reviewers. Which journal and how high-impact? What type of publication (full length manuscript vs brief communication; microbio, computational, clinical, etc)?

Typically, 3-9 months is a reasonable window. SciRev crowdsources some of this info and may be useful.

Does it all depends on how well PIs review the papers? my son says papers submitted from his lab gets very few revision requests. He is in computational research though.

 

[PipetteDreams]

Does it all depends on how well PIs review the papers? my son says papers submitted from his lab gets very few revision requests. He is in computational research though.

Sure, a well-mentored paper will have more success than a poorly-mentored one.

Computational research also has shorter turn-around time, with less intense revision requests. This is partially a product of the research (you do not need to enroll patients, breed mice, run time-intensive/delicate experiments), and partially a product of the journals computational work is most often published in (lower impact journals will not ask for as far-reaching changes). Computational work also tends to be more open-source, which benefits from frequent publication. Students who do work in computational fields are more expected to have a high output, with each paper providing a smaller incremental gain to the field.

This is not to say computational work is not extremely important to medical science advancement, there are just different cultures around publishing practices. FWIW, my PhD is in engineering, so I did -- and observed -- a fair amount of both computational and bench research.

 

[EdgeTrimmer]

Sure, a well-mentored paper will have more success than a poorly-mentored one.

Computational research also has shorter turn-around time, with less intense revision requests. This is partially a product of the research (you do not need to enroll patients, breed mice, run time-intensive/delicate experiments), and partially a product of the journals computational work is most often published in (lower impact journals will not ask for as far-reaching changes). Computational work also tends to be more open-source, which benefits from frequent publication. Students who do work in computational fields are more expected to have a high output, with each paper providing a smaller incremental gain to the field.

This is not to say computational work is not extremely important to medical science advancement, there are just different cultures around publishing practices. FWIW, my PhD is in engineering, so I did -- and observed -- a fair amount of both computational and bench research.

@PipetteDreams - Thank you very much. My son is working in the same lab for last two and half years and I am hoping that his first author paper will be published in time for application cycle but his PI is expanding the scope to make it a stronger paper or submit to higher impact journal.

 

[EdgeTrimmer]

It’s ok to not have any publications even when applying to top schools if you have high quality research and a good recommendation letter from the PI. I think most understand that publications in undergrad can be largely due to luck; ie joining the right lab at the right time.

@StanleyYelnats - Yeah, I am hoping for very strong LOR from his PI. He should be getting one or two middle author papers in addition to first author but don't know the timelines.

 

[Goro]

Does it all depends on how well PIs review the papers? my son says papers submitted from his lab gets very few revision requests. He is in computational research though.

It's more like how much revision needs to be done, and the time it will take to actually do them.

Reviewer time is also an unknown. Some reviewers are simply lazy.