Abstract
This investigation tries to determine if, for highly visible journals, namely Nature, Science and Cell, articles with a short editorial delay time generally, receive more citations than those with a long editorial delay. Based on data for the period from 2005 to 2009, it is found that there is a clear, although statistically weak, tendency for an inverse relation between editorial delay time and number of received citations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Amat, C. B. (2008). Editorial and publication delay of papers submitted to 14 selected food research journals. Influence of online posting. Scientometrics, 74(3), 379–389.
Campanario, J. M. (1996). Have referees rejected some of the most-cited articles of all times? Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47(4), 302–310.
Campanario, J. M., & Acedo, E. (2007). Rejecting highly cited papers: The views of scientists who encounter resistance to their discoveries from other scientists. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(5), 734–743.
De Marchi, M. & Rocchi, M. (2001). The editorial policies of scientific journals: Testing an impact factor model. Scientometrics, 51(2), 395–404.
Egghe, L., & Rousseau, R. (2000). The influence of publication delays on the observed aging distribution of scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 51(2), 158–165.
Luwel, M., & van Wijk, E. (2012). Publication delays revisited: 1998–2012. In Archambault, Gingras, Larivière (Eds.) Proceedings of STI 2012 (pp. 569–577). Montréal: Science-Metrix.
Pautasso, M., & Schäfer, H. (2010). Peer review delay and selectivity in ecology journals. Scientometrics, 84(2), 307–315.
Rousseau, R., García-Zorita, C., & Sanz-Casado, E. (2013). The h-bubble. Journal of Informetrics, 7(2), 294–300.
Rousseau, S., & Rousseau, R. (2012). Interactions between journal attributes and authors’ willingness to wait for editorial decisions. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(6), 1213–1225.
Siler, K., Lee, K., & Bero, L. (2015). Measuring the effectiveness of scientific gatekeeping. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 112(2), 360–365.
Yegros-Yegros, A., & Amat, C. B. (2009). Editorial delay of food research papers is influenced by authors’ experience but not by country of origin of the manuscripts. Scientometrics, 81(2), 367–380.
Yu, G., Yu, D. R., & Li, Y. J. (2005). A simulation study of the periodicals’ publication delay control process. Scientometrics, 63(1), 25–38.
Yu, G., Yu, D. R., & Rong, Y. H. (2000). The mathematical models of the periodical literature publishing process. Information Processing and Management, 36(3), 401–414.
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to our undergraduates for their hard work in data collection and proofreading, paving the way for the present article. Heartfelt thanks also go to Professor Xinning Su and Professor Shuiqing Huang for their generous support. The research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 71303120).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Shen, S., Rousseau, R., Wang, D. et al. Editorial delay and its relation to subsequent citations: the journals Nature, Science and Cell . Scientometrics 105, 1867–1873 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1592-8
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1592-8