Rapid Publication Claims: What Fast Review Really Means

A journal that promises a decision in days may be quoting a desk decision, a production step, or nothing you can check. The number means little until you know what it counts.

Explainer · 10 min read · Directive Publications Editorial Team

What a speed claim can actually measure

A manuscript passes through several stages on its way to becoming a citable article: editorial screening, reviewer invitations, review, revision, acceptance, copyediting and proofs, online publication. A journal advertising speed is describing one of those intervals, and rarely says which.

The decision rule: before a speed figure goes into advice, an approved-journal list or a grant timeline, rewrite it with every blank filled. From [event] to [event], for [which papers], as a [median or mean], over [which period]. If the journal's own pages cannot fill the blanks, the figure is marketing, not information.

How publishers define their speed metrics

Definitions differ, and the difference changes what a number means. Nature Portfolio's journal metrics page defines submission to first editorial decision as the median time "from when a submission is received to when a first editorial decision about whether the paper was sent out for formal review or not is sent to the authors." On that definition, a decision to send your paper to reviewers counts as the first decision. Its submission-to-accept figure is also a median running to final acceptance, so it includes the time authors spent revising.

PLOS ONE's journal information page splits that stage in two, reporting "time to first editorial decision (rejection or peer review)" — the screening step — separately from "time to first decision", alongside time to acceptance, time from acceptance to publication and the share of submissions desk rejected. All its figures are medians in days.

Both publishers are being transparent, and neither definition is wrong. But a number counting a "send it to reviewers" decision and one counting the decision reached after reviewers report measure different events, so the two cannot sit side by side. It is easy to read any "first decision" figure as "reviewer reports in hand", and often it is not.

A worked example

Take an imaginary journal receiving 100 manuscripts. Seven days in, editors have declined 60 without review and sent the other 40 to reviewers, who report at day 60.

Handling is identical in every row, and an author whose paper goes to review waits about two months in all of them. Ask which row a journal's number comes from.

What realistic medical timelines look like

Published evidence gives rough benchmarks, not targets. In Wallach and colleagues' 2018 pilot survey of corresponding authors of clinical research in MEDLINE-indexed journals, among the 212 respondents able to give dates, the median time from first submission to acceptance was 5 months (interquartile range 3 to 8), and to publication 7 months (5 to 12). Those times run from the first submission to any journal, so they include earlier rejections. The authors call it a feasibility study: it drew a 21% response rate, 337 of 1,604 eligible authors of articles entered in MEDLINE between 1 and 15 December 2016. Read the figures as an order of magnitude.

Björk and Solomon's 2013 analysis in the Journal of Informetrics covered a stratified random sample of 2,700 papers in 135 Scopus-indexed journals, and found the shortest delays in science, technology and medicine. By far the largest share of variation in time from submission to acceptance lay between articles within the same journal, not between journals, disciplines or journal sizes; for time from acceptance to publication, most variation came from differences between journals.

So a journal's median review time says little about how long a particular paper will take, while production time is a steadier basis for comparison. For a reviewed research article the unit of planning is months, and any figure quoted in days describes a single stage.

Legitimate reasons a journal can be fast

Speed alone is not suspicious. These ordinary practices produce it:

• Quick desk decisions. Declining an out-of-scope paper within days is a service: the authors can submit elsewhere sooner.
• Selective fast-track routes. At the time of writing, The Lancet states that research papers its editors judge eligible, usually randomised controlled trials, are peer reviewed within 72 hours and, if accepted, published within four weeks of receipt. The route is limited by eligibility and still peer reviewed.
• Prioritisation during emergencies. Horbach's 2020 study in Quantitative Science Studies, covering 669 articles in 14 medical journals, found time from submission to publication for COVID-19 articles fell by 49% on average, mostly through shorter peer review, while other articles at the same journals were not accelerated. The author noted this may raise concerns about review quality.
• Continuous online publication. Journals that publish each article when it is ready avoid the issue backlogs Björk and Solomon identify as one cause of long delays.

If the need is to share results quickly rather than to hold a peer-reviewed article, a preprint may meet it. Our guide to preprints, accepted manuscripts and versions of record explains which version to share and which to cite.

When speed is a warning sign

The standards are clear about promises. The Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, from COPE, DOAJ, OASPA and WAME, state: "Journals should not guarantee acceptance of initial manuscript submissions. Statements of peer review times should be supported by published timeframes on accepted papers." They also ask journals to show a publication date on research, and prefer submission and acceptance dates too.

Evidence from biomedical journals points the same way. Shamseer and colleagues' 2017 cross-sectional comparison in BMC Medicine found that potential predatory journals, set against legitimate open access and subscription titles, tended to address prospective authors directly, inviting submissions and promising rapid publication. Nearly all journals in every group said they used peer review, so that phrase alone distinguishes nothing.

Our list of 12 red flags for predatory journals covers guaranteed acceptance and impossibly short review promises, the blunt cases. The subtler failures are about what a journal will and will not show you:

• A speed figure with no definition attached, or one that changes between the homepage, the guidelines and the call for papers.
• Published articles carrying no received or accepted dates, so the claim cannot be checked.
• Dates present but uniform: research articles each accepted the same few days after receipt, with no revision date in between. Genuine review produces a spread.
• A turnaround that applies to a fast-track or special-issue route, quoted as though it were the journal's ordinary handling.
• Speed as the main selling point of an unsolicited invitation, with no mention of scope, criteria or the editor's name.

None is proof on its own. Each is a question you can put to the journal in writing, and the quality of the answer is informative.

Paid fast-track: what the fee should buy

Paid fast-track terms repay close reading. JMIR Publications' peer review process page, for example, guarantees fast-track papers an editorial decision within 20 business days and publication within four weeks of acceptance, while saying it cannot guarantee the speed of ordinary review. Its help article on the route adds that the fee "does not guarantee peer review" — an editor may still desk reject — and is non-refundable, which JMIR justifies on the grounds that the decision is still made within the promised time. Those terms describe exactly what such a fee buys: a deadline on the decision, not a route past the editor.

The principle to hold on to comes from the same COPE, DOAJ, OASPA and WAME principles: author fees "should not influence editorial decision making." A legitimate fee buys faster handling, never a better chance of acceptance. Paid routes are also contested. In March 2015 Scientific Reports began a pilot letting authors pay $750 for an editorial decision within three weeks, with review organised by an outside service. One editorial board member resigned almost immediately, objecting to well-funded labs being able to jump the publication queue, and by late April the trial had ended following editorial board resignations.

Before a fast-track fee is paid from grant or institutional funds, get written answers to three questions: which decision is guaranteed and by when, what happens after the first round, and whether the fee is refunded after a desk rejection. Then ask whether a free editor-approved fast track exists for urgent work.

How to test a speed claim

The principle that review times should be supported by published timeframes gives you a method you can run from the journal's own website in one sitting: check the dates.

1. Find the journal's definition of its speed figure, noting whether it is a median or a mean and which period it covers.
2. Open ten recent original research articles, not editorials or letters.
3. Record the received, revised, accepted and first online dates on each.
4. Work out the days from submission to acceptance and from acceptance to online publication.
5. Compare the spread of those intervals with the claim.

Then read the shape, not the average. Because most variation in review time sits between articles within one journal, your ten will scatter and a few will sit well beyond the rest. That long tail is what a median hides, so compare the quoted figure against the slower half of your sample and plan against that. Acceptance-to-online intervals should cluster tightly, since that stage is a production line; wide scatter suggests a backlog the advertised figure is not describing.

For the rest of an unfamiliar journal's profile, the checks in our guide to how institutions can spot predatory publishing risks fit alongside this one.

Speed is a planning variable, not a quality signal

For institutions, the conclusion is to keep speed out of the criteria used to judge journals and in the information used to plan. Fast review is neither a mark of quality nor proof of predation. So when a researcher facing a grant, promotion or thesis deadline asks which journal is fastest, redirect the question: choose on fit and process, build the timeline from the journal's published dates rather than its advertised figure, and use an eligible fast-track route or a preprint where the urgency is genuine. If the deadline cannot survive a realistic timeline, the deadline is what to renegotiate.

Directive Publications' peer review process page sets out each stage from desk assessment to publication, and explains why it describes handling commitments qualitatively rather than promising fixed turnaround times. Its resources for authors bring together the guidelines and policies that apply before submission.