How Much Time Do Journals Give Their Referees?
Elizabeth Hannon, deputy editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (BJPS), has a query about other philosophy journals.
She says, “What I’d like to know is how much time journals give referees to return their reports.”
She adds that “the BJPS gives one month, though of course plenty of people are far quicker than this and we’re happy to offer deadline extensions to those who need them.”
Editorial teams at philosophy journals, please let us know in the comments. Thanks!
Same for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. We give 30 days. If an extension is requested, we can usually accommodate it (giving an extension is usually preferable to finding a new reviewer, since that will create more of a delay). When we’re approaching summer and winter holidays, I often extend the initial invitation to 45 days, since people are reluctant to accept invitations that would give them a deadline during the holiday period.
I am biased, since I have published with and edited/reviewed for BJPS, but I think one month is the perfect amount of time. As a reviewer, I generally will not accept an assignment with a two-week turnaround; all the existing activities and events on my calendar are too salient. But give me two or three months, and I will more often than not sit on the paper until the week the review is due, since reviewer work is the easiest thing to postpone when one is busy. So one month strikes me as a nice balance: long enough to get plenty of agreement, but short enough not to waste too much time.
Ethics gives reviewers a deadline of 30 days unless they ask for time, which we almost always grant, since it is generally hard to find suitable reviewers.
PPE gives referees 6 weeks.
JESP (The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy) has a default of 35 days, though like others, we’re happy to work with the referee to agree on a different deadline.
Same for Studies in HPS.
As someone who spent their career in political science (as a political theorist) these numbers are mindblowing (in a good way). In my world, under three months was considered quick! Say what you will about the philosophy profession, but this they get right.
Note that these are not turnaround times. You need to add the time it takes to find reviewers and then the time it takes the editor to make a decision. Many journals will take more than three months to deliver a verdict.
Ah! Thanks for clarifying.
I’m a philosopher of science, but I’ve refereed/served as guest editor for a number of science journals. Norms in science seems different than philosophy, e.g. PNAS gives 14 days.
Might as well ask how long is a piece of string? Journals say a number, sure, but they almost always just reset the deadline over and over if the reviewer begs for an extension. The elephant in the room is of course that Mind and JPhil feel (on the author’s side) like they take 18 months, as a phenomenological datum, so if that phenomenology is a relible indicator, Mind/Jphil must be giving referees a lot of time (6 months or more) to issue their rejections.
There’s a lot of steps in the process – the editor in chief glances at a paper and decides whether to send it to an associate editor; the associate editor looks through the paper and decides whether to ask for referees; there’s a process of sending invitations before you get the needed one or two to agree; then the referee has the official 4-6 weeks most people are indicating here, though a good number of them end up taking advantage of the automatic reminders you get every week for the next few weeks; after the report(s) get back, the associate editor needs to look again and decide what decision to make; then the editor in chief needs to agree.
The editor in chief steps and associate editor steps could be done in a day or two, if the journal is the editor’s primary work priority – but even for people with these priorities, things that occur during conference travel or when term papers are coming in can sometimes get dragged out to a week or more.
But I think the period of sending referee invitations, waiting for them to decline, and then sending some more, and repeating until you get the needed number, is usually the longest part of the process, unless the referee who agrees ends up failing to actually produce the report – in which case this entire process needs to repeat.
It’s certainly not at all unheard-of for a referee to actually take six months from agreeing to actually get the report in. But I don’t think any journals have that as their official duration.
Well yeah, that’s why Tyron pointed out the discrepancy between the official duration, which “journals say” they stick to, and the (sometimes but not always much longer) duration that some of them *actually* stick to…
You are probably correct that finding reviewers is the most time consuming task for a journal. However, that is also a task that can be done a lot faster than most journals do it. I have normally followed the process of over-inviting reviewers (e.g., if I need 2 reviewers, I start by inviting 4-6, unless I know someone is especially likely to say “yes”). Moreover, manuscript systems allows invitations to be sent automatically when a reviewer declines, so this is just a situation in which journal editors are stuck in old processes that simply aren’t efficient.
There is data, though it relies on authors to report it so might not be reliable. In any case, JPhil has an “average response time” of 7.6 monthds and Mind of 5.5. I don’t know whether these data are skewed by desk rejections; if they are, then the time in review must be longer (perhaps not muh longer, judging by the small of number of reports of very short turn around times).
Most, but not all, of the egregiously long turn around times at those journals were more than a decade ago.
Any request that would give me less than 2 months, I refuse. My agenda for the next 4 weeks is normally full. For context, I am mid-career and head a research group. I’m asked to review 20–30 times a year.
Fine so long as you and your group never submit to any journal that offers referees less than 2 months – which is pretty much all of them.
I referee many more papers than I submit in a given year.
if you actually do it in 2 months many journals would prefer you accept it than decline it forcing them to find someone else
I’m so sorry I don’t get my reviews in earlier, i will try to be better. I have terrible procrastination. Seriously
Hume Studies allows 5 weeks from the time request is sent and asks for a reply within 1 week. Of course, some reviewers are late, and some ask for extensions. Late reviewers have a de facto extension, since we don’t want to start over with a new reviewer. It’s difficult to know what to do about late reviewers who don’t check in, except to badger them.
I’ve reviewed ~10 papers so far, and I think every time I was given (approximately) a month.
Two weeks is okay to ask. More than a month is silly, as referees will just forget about it. It has been said 30 days was the sweet spot for requests. I think it is closer to half that. But it is also my view that many referees do not know what they are doing and take much too long for the task.
When receiving requests, I do not seriously look at the proposed deadline. If I accept, I will do it when I can, appreciate reminders, and sometimes ask for more time. Seems to gel with overall practice.
John-Joe,
how different we are. I only agree to referee a paper if I can do it in the next two days. And I usually take a day or two to finish the task. The most I have taken is 10 days. I have refereed over 200 papers – quite a lot for Philosophy of Science and Synthese.
I also review for non-philosophy journals where you usually get only 3 weeks.
I may also take a day or two, like you, but mostly I work on the task for a few hours only. By the way, it seems that you have spent around 150 days reviewing papers. I wonder over how many years? Just curious
I have been at this for a while … 2+ decades, but most of the refereeing has been in the last 15 years … I have also reviewed a bunch of book proposals and manuscripts, large grant applications (NSF, ERC, etc.).
We give reviewers a month at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, but the number of reviewers who go totally AWOL, need many rounds of reminders and stretch out the process for like 6 months, or just never reply to requests at all is so demoralizing. I know we are all asked to do way too much but I am begging people to have the basic decency to take literally 15 seconds to respond promptly and honestly when you get a request, saying whether you can do it and when you can do it by. PLEASE. Finding reviewers is already grueling, all the authors are already righteously mad at how long everything takes … there is just no need for it. Just be minimally polite and honest.
I promise that the mental load of having it in the back of your mind that you need to respond to a request takes up way more of your busy time than just jotting off a one sentence email or clicking a few buttons right away. And the mental load of being aware for months that you are late on a review adds both stress and time to just doing it when you said you would. And again, if you can’t do that, don’t say you can.
This should be basic professional etiquette and ethics but it is violated more often than respected!
PS: A complicating factor is that so many journals now have these elaborate clunky systems where you have to go through an elaborate registration and password recovery process just to say “no.” This too is a violation of basic professional etiquette and decency! Journal editors, just say “no” to these sorts of un-asked-for impositions on people’s time and executive function. So, I give a *partial* pass on ghosting orignial requests if responding to them becomes genuinely unavoidably awful. But you can usually just reply to the email and say f*ck your submission management software but sorry no.
I emphatically agree with Quill that a quick and honest “No” when you don’t have time is far preferable to keeping the editors in limbo. (Though I recognize the anxiety and guilt that gets people there.)
We also try to make sure that the editorial management system has all the right “deep links” set up so that people don’t have to futz with logins and such to accept, decline, or enter their review. Most of them can do this, but you need to bug your publisher to make sure it is set up.
30 days at HOPOS, with some grace for those who need some more time. We’ve got a pretty prompt and conscientious community of reviewers overall, which makes things a good bit easier.
At both Nous and PPR we ask for reports within 6 weeks.
Many thanks, Justin, for asking this question, and to everyone else for these responses—very helpful!
There are a number of responses here that suggest journals shouldn’t offer deadline extensions. I wonder what you think editors should instead do in these circumstances?
JPhil asks for reviews to be submitted in a month. We grant extensions up to two months, occasionally longer if we don’t *yet* have anyone else lined up.
The JPhil review process first came under strain at least 20 years ago, when reviewing in-house became increasingly untenable. Overwhelm was only partially addressed for years after that. The review process is still not optimally efficient, but I believe it’s no longer egregious. I now play more of a handling editor role, so I am more protective of the integrity of the review process and its responsiveness to authors.
It has been quite a surprise to me to learn how quickly some other fields conduct peer review.
These numbers could be dramatically improved if journals paid/credited reviewers. Preaching to the converted, I know.
What sorts of credit would be helpful (honest question)? Please feel free to contact me directly if you want to discuss offline. Thank you. My email address is on this page:
https://www.journalofphilosophy.org/contacts.html
I’m not sure. I still have stuff on my agenda. Even for paid reviewing (mostly grants and books), I still decline if the deadline is too tight (among other considerations).
I’d be curious if the norms at journals have changed in the last 10 years. Five or more years ago, I would review papers on 45-60 day deadlines pretty regularly. I almost always got those done a bit early. Now I often get requests with default deadlines of 30 days or fewer — sometimes as short as 14 days. I can manage that in the summer but not in the middle of a semester, so I decline far more invitations than I used to.
Hi folks! JAPA (The Journal of the American Philosophical Association) requests reports in 30 days. But, our current time-to-decision is only 22 days! FYI, our acceptance rate is 10%.
Almost all reviewing at Free & Equal is done in-house by our Associate Editors. We normally give each AE one month to complete a review. Promising papers are normally read by two AEs: if the first reader is enthusiastic, it will then be sent to a second AE, who also has a month to complete their report.
Curious: does “enthusiastic” mean a strong accept/minor to no revisions requested, or it just means anything that’s not a reject?
If an Associate Editor recommends Revise and Resubmit or any more enthusiastic verdict (Conditional Acceptance, Acceptance), the paper goes to a second Associate Editor for review. We also have a decision status called “Reject and Resubmit” for papers that are potentially promising, but underdeveloped. A paper that receives “Reject and Resubmit” gets comments from one AE and is sent back to author to respond to these comments. If, on resubmission, the first AE finds it substantially improved, and recommends Revise and Resubmit, it will then be passed to a second AE.
MIND gives reviewers 6 weeks. If a reviewer requests an extension (e.g. because they are especially busy), we decide that on a case-by-case basis.