A Three-Decade History of the Duration of Peer Review
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Review time is the duration between submission of a manuscript for possible publication and the author's receipt of notification of the editor's decision. There are two key questions about the peer-review process: (1) Has average review time changed over the past several decades? and (2) Has the adoption of online submission reduced average review time? A sample of 170 manuscripts submitted to a variety of journals from 1980 through 2012 indicates (1) no statistically significant difference between average review time for manuscripts submitted to behavioural science journals (mean=14.8 weeks) and average review time for manuscripts submitted to natural history journals (mean=15.2 weeks); (2) a statistically significant decrease from 1980 to 2012 in average review time irrespective of form of submission (i.e., paper or electronic); and (3) manuscripts submitted in paper form (1980–2009) had an average review time five weeks longer than that of manuscripts submitted online or electronically (2004–2012).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.092 | 0.442 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.018 | 0.053 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.059 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it