From first submission to citation: an empirical analysis

The academic publication process consists of two stages. The first stage covers for example the conception of a paper, its submission to a journal, possible revisions due to comments made by (anonymous) reviewers, and acceptance of the manuscript. The second stage concerns the eventual publication of the paper and the second part of its academic life–cycle, which is usually measured by a citation score. Next to describing this process in some detail, this paper describes the results of an empirical analysis of my personal database with detailed records of 66 published papers. Descriptive statistics give insights as to how long it takes (on average) before the editor returns to the author with the reviews, and also how long it takes for the editor to make a final decision on acceptance, based on a revised manuscript. Econometric models are used to see if, for example, the number of pages, the number of authors, and the number of previous rejections have an impact on these durations. Also, it is examined if a special issue makes a difference. It is found that it does, in the sense that special issue papers get cited more often. Finally, it is studied whether the editorial process and observable properties of the paper have any effect on the number of citations, which can be seen as a measure of quality.

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