Th journal surveys have been up for a couple of months. Now let’s start playing around with the results and have a little fun. I’m picking a list of some of the top, general journals to compare reported review times. Below I’ve listed the average review time and the mode (both in months). I’ve also listed the number of surveys that have been submitted for each of the journals.
Note that some of the journals have very high numbers. I haven’t imported the Phil Wiki Data on some of these journals (e.g. Philosophers’ Imprint, Philosophical Review). I hope to do that soon.
| Journal | Average | Mode | Surveys |
| Analysis | 0.69 | 0.5 | 98 |
| Philosophers Imprint | 2.29 | 1 | 10 |
| Philosophical Quarterly | 2.36 | 2 | 77 |
| PPR | 2.67 | 1 | 53 |
| Nous | 3.47 | 2 | 65 |
| Philosophical Studies | 3.81 | 2 | 85 |
| Australasian Journal of Philosophy | 4.18 | 2 | 49 |
| Philosophical Review | 7.06 | 8 | 21 |
| Mind | 7.62 | 6 | 49 |
| Journal of Philosophy | 12.59 | 16 | 33 |
Some Observations
Not As Bad as I Thought
With all of the journal horror stories floating around, I was predicting that the average review times would be much higher across the board. But if you’ll notice, most of the journals above have averages below 4 months. What’s really interesting are the modes. All journals but three of these journals have modes of 2 months or less.
Hall of Fame
Rock on Phil Quarterly, Phil Imprint, and PPR. Less than 3 month averages. Modes of 1 month. Well done.
Analysis
You’re in the Hall of Fame too, but you’re also in a league of your own. You deserve your own separate comment. Analysis, you have a .69 average based on 97 surveys! That’s incredible. Granted the papers that Analysis reviews are likely quite a bit shorter than your typical journal submission. But this is still impressive. Submissions don’t get a lot of comments, but I think most philosophers are agreed that if you can say “No” in less than a month, we won’t be upset about not getting comments (especially since we know it helps keep turn around time down).
Miscellaneous News About the Journal Surveys
Phil Wiki Data Coming Soon
As I noted above, I haven’t had a chance to import Phil Wiki Data. Now that the semester has started it may take me some time to get around to it, but I will do this.
More Journal Info Coming Soon
I have not ignored requests to provide a way for philosophers to submit other useful information about journals. Here is my proto-type. I’ll eventually incorporate something like this into the page for each journal.
Keep Submitting Those Surveys
Just so it’s clear, the surveys never close. Each survey will stay up indefinitely so that we philosophers can always have up-to-date data concerning our journals.
Very cool. If your papers are taking longer than avg., what does that mean? Someone told me that my papers were taking longer because they were too complicated. I thought that was a silly comment, but now I’m worried.
One of the journals on the list that does well is pushing 6 months for me, but they told me that this is the fault of a delinquent referee that they’ve replaced after he jerked them around and not delivering reports he said he had finished. I guess they should be cut some slack.
That’s a good question. I’m sure there are multiple reasons, but here’s one:
Sometimes people take a long time to respond to requests to referee, and they don’t offer names of people who they think might be qualified to referee (I believe Weatherson has cited this as a problem). If this happens to an editor a couple of times, the delay adds up.
I had a paper sit around at a journal for over 12 months.There average is much lower than 12 months. After 4 months, I would contact the managing editor every 2-3 months. The last couple of correspondences explicitly stated that the referee they were using (a) was being slow and (b) that this slowness wasn’t unusual from this particular referee.
So I suspect a lot of slowness above the journal’s average is likely attributable to referees (or potential referees) in one way or another.
Once again, very useful!
Interesting information. Can I just ask what a “mode” is?
I’m all for quick review times, but I suspect some journals that manage to do the avg. review in under a month do this in part by not bothering to read many of the submissions. It might be nice if that journal accepted submissions anonymously (or under someone else’s name).