-- Miguel Roig, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Psychology Notre Dame Div., St. John's College St. John's University 300 Howard Avenue Staten Island, NY 10301 (718) 390-4513 Fax: (718) 442-3612 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~roigm
-------------- Original message -------------- From: "Christopher D. Green" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Annette, I'm just finishing a stint as a journal editor. The turnover time varies extremely widely from journal to journal, depending on things like the size of staff, the ability to find willing reviewers, the willingness of the reviewers to actually do the work they have agreed to do, etc. You have faced what seems to me to be an inordinately long time, but not unusually long (esp. for APA which, in my experience, is worse than most at this sort of thing). I once waited ten months for American Psychologist to tell me that they wouldn't even submit my paper to peer review! One thing I noted during my time as an editor was that "hard" scientists and medical types expect extremely short turnover times, leading me to believe that things are better (in science) outside of psychology. Humanities journals, by contrast, can be horrendously long (partly because of staff and funding issues, but partly because they just don't have the same sense of urgency about their work that scientists typically do). I tried to get reviewers to do their work within one month (but I have a colleague who automatically rejects any review request that has a time line of less than six weeks). I tried to get decisions back to authors within two months (giving me two weeks to find reviewers in the first place, and two weeks to read the reviews and make a decision afterwards), but I must admit that it typically extended to three months, and sometimes longer. This was primarily because many (perhaps half of?) reviewers have to be reminded, often multiple times, to do the job they have agreed to do. (My "favorite" moment, which happened not all that infrequently, was when, after multiple promises to get me a review -- "next week"... "this week"... "tomorrow" [I usually gave them double the time they had asked for before reminding them again] -- they would stop responding to e-mails and then claim that there must have been some technical problem with the internet connection.) Also, admittedly, my own lif e would get in the way sometimes, and with no other "senior" staff to spell me off, papers would pile up a bit. In any case, there is no reason for editors to be curt with authors (unless they have so many submissions that they can afford to alienate people). My response -- even for those "busy" physicians who expected two-week turnarounds -- was "I am sorry for the delay," followed by an outline of the process in which I predicted it would take about twice the time it would probably actually take, so there would be no more disappointments down the line. :-) Regards, Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ======================== [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have had an article submitted last May which was returned in January for revision; was resubmitted in less than two weeks and when my coauthor contacted the editor basically got a curt email back that it's only been since early Feb that it it was resubmitted, and, reading between the lines, suggested we were highly unreasonable to expect anything back yet. In an era where so many important decisions (tenure, promotion, salary raises) are based on pubs, in addition to the desire to see our work disseminated (before someone else does, as we have freely shared all of our prepub work and have already seen trickles without any reference to our work!--directly written by people who had asked for prepub work from conferences) we thought we were being very reasonable in waiting patiently this long. I'd rather not name the journal. It is an APA journal, but not a "biggee", like JEP. What is a proper turn around time for an editor to collect 3 reviews? Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 619-260-4006 [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ---To make changes to your subscription contact:Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
