We selected five Indian, clinical, biomedical journals with the highest Impact Factors (Thompson Scientific) for the year 2008. Print issues of Indian Pediatrics (IP), The Indian Journal of Pediatrics (IJP), Neurology India (NI), The Indian Journal of Medical Research (IJMR) and Journal of Postgraduate Medicine (JPGM) were hand searched for the two year period from January 2007 to December 2008 to determine the article specific information including the dates of submission, review, acceptance, and publication.

Of the journals studied, IP, IJP and IJMR were monthly, and NI and JPGM were quarterly publications. We found desired complete information for calculation of various time periods only in IP and JPGM. Indian Journal of Medical Research only provided time from submission to publication, and NI provided time from acceptance to publication. Two issues of IJP did not provide the relevant dates related to the editorial process. The various time periods are detailed in Table I.

TABLE I



Time Taken for Publication of Original Papers (2007-2008) 

Time from submission to review, which is the editor’s first response, also called as ‘turn-around time’, is approximately 3 months (for accepted manuscripts) for both IP and JPGM. The average time taken after the first review is around 4 months. After acceptance, an additional around 3.5 months are taken for the article to come in printed form. JPGM was the journal with the shortest time from submission to print (202.9 days), but this was not significantly different from the other journals.

Many authors have suggested turn around time as a marker of timeliness of a journal’s review process [3-4]. This data for accepted manuscripts was available only for IP (85 days) and JPGM (107 days) and was comparable to previously reported median delay of 2-4 months [3-5]. The use of the Internet makes it possible to massively reduce the duration of time from first submission of a manuscript to its eventual publication [1,2]. The effect of electronic manuscript/email submission on timeliness was studied but no consistent differences in the timeliness of publication were found between journal with or without electronic manuscript submission.

The time from review to acceptance is dependant both on the authors (a long time taken to revise the manuscript, not all comments addressed, etc), and the journal office (decision on the revised manuscript, speed of re-review, etc). It has previously also been reported that waiting for authors’ responses to editorial feedback is the greatest cause of delay in the editorial processes [6]. The average time (125 days) in this study was much higher than previous reports [7].

The time from manuscript submission to publication for the five journals studied is not significantly different, but is much higher than that for many international journals. There is an urgent need to identify and address the factors responsible for this long time-lag.

Contributors: DM conceived the idea of the study. Both authors contributed equally in designing the study, literature review and drafting the paper. JB did the data collection and would be the guarantor.

Funding: None.

Competing interests: None stated.

1. Harnad S. Research access, impact and assessment. Times Higher Education 2001; (Supplement) 1487: 16. Available from: URL: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac. uk/12085/. Accessed on 30 October, 2009.

2. Guang Yu, Yi-Jun Li. A scientometric assessment of the information loss caused by the delays in publication. Information Science. 2006;32:78-87.

3. Taylor and Francis Author Survey. Available from: URL: www.informaworld.com/smpp/authors_journals_ feedback. Accessed on 4 November, 2009.

4. Sandler MP. Turnaround: Time to take a look. Nuclear Med. 2001;42:1-2.

5. Wade D, Tennant A. An audit of the editorial process and peer review. Clin Rehabil. 2004;18:117-24.

6. Green R, Del Mar C. Research papers submitted to Australian Family Physician - types and timelines. Aust Fam Physician. 2006;35:362-4.

7. Reyes BH, Andresen HM, Palma HJ. What determines the time-lag for publications in Revista Médica de Chile? Rev Med Chil. 2006;134:811-12.