Finish it yourself. Get people to read through it and provide advice. Tell him that have done these two things in an effort to get it ready for publication, and to improve your writing. If you put in that much more effort, and have had others look at it, it will put more pressure on him to get it out. Especially if you format it for a specific journal (look on the website), prepare a cover letter, and print off signature pages. Seems like a bit pushy, but it's easy to spin it as trying to help and learn about the process.
My PhD supervisor strung me along about my first manuscript for 11 months! He would say things like "have you read this book about writing papers" and such to deflect off the fact that he was incredibly inefficient. Finally, after doing the above (and getting co-authors, committee members, etc to read it), we submitted to a good journal (impact 6.5) and it was provisionally accepted outright. I wanted to be like, "so I can't write a paper, huh?" but I just left it.
One of the reasons I picked my present postdoc supervisor is that I like his style. We meet for ~1 hr to go through a manuscript I have written, and he makes some requests for changes etc. Then he lets me be corresponding author, make the changes, and submit without meeting again. As a result of this, I have published a lot of papers with him.
I think that PIs that sit on papers are particularly cruel. It takes ~6 mo to get a paper accepted (if you only have to revise the manuscript with minimal experimental changes), so wasting your time is not right. If your papers have all gone through peer review by the time you defend your thesis, the defense is a breeze. You also don't want a lot of unfinished business when you get back on the wards.
Treg
