Guest Post – Publishing Fast or Slow: How Speed Varies for Similar Journals - The Scholarly Kitchen

"In late 2022, I wrote in The Scholarly Kitchen about publishing speed. That post discussed how publishing has become faster thanks to improvements in production by most publishers and the emergence of MDPI. It also showed that the review process by mainstream publishers has been as slow in recent years as it was ten years ago.

Here, I explore in more detail two research categories, a fast one (Biochemistry) and a slow one (Economics & Econometrics). I show the wild variation in performance among journals that have similar profiles. I also discuss how publishers have become more concerned about speed these days, but they are facing an uphill battle. Finally, I discuss the lack of informational transparency about speed (contrary to other metrics) when researchers assess journals, and how I wish to address the informational gap by collaborating with journal-finding tools, such as the one offered by Researcher.Life...."