Tips to Accelerate Paper Publication Process in Journals

Every researcher is concerned about how to accelerate paper publication process in journals, because a rapid and timely publication process can speed up the distribution of findings, lower the chances of plagiarism, and allow you to begin the next study as soon as possible.

Research is a slow process and requires careful design, optimization and replication of experiments. As soon as the data collection is complete, you may want to publish it quickly. Rapid publication of an article can speed up the process of distribution of findings, reduce the likelihood of plagiarism and data being stolen, and allow the researcher to begin the next study as soon as possible.

Good journals take a couple of weeks to review papers. This is very field dependent. In some fields, the norm is as short as a month (or less!). Some fields primarily rely on conferences instead of journals, which generally have very short turnaround times.

Whether you are performing a research experiment or in the middle of writing an article, the following tips will help you accelerate paper publication process:

Prepare & Prewrite

Keeping in mind that publication of your research is your ultimate goal, plan ahead and prepare everything during the time you are collecting your data, this will reduce the time wasted on repeating work to obtain presentable data. The process of drafting figures, tables or any other illustrations, as well as writing your paper, would be time consuming if more time has passed since the data was collected; therefore consider drafting and writing earlier! Writing the introduction and literature review sections, which is typically based on past research, will help expedite manuscript preparation.

You can also prepare your reference section during the prewriting process and decrease the time to find previously-studied references! For this, you can use referencing software to archive relevant references and automatically format your citations according to the target journal’s guidelines and update your reference list whenever you add or remove a citation.

Write Correctly

If your paper has grammatical or vocabulary errors, especially in case you are non-native English speaker, or it is not been written clearly or in a well-designed way, the editors and reviewers of a journal to whom you have submitted your paper may have difficulty understanding the content and this may increase the sense of negative bias against poorly written manuscripts, making rejection more likely!

Select Right Journal

To avoid any loss of time by submitting manuscripts to inadequate journals, select a journal whose scope is a good fit for your research focus. There are thousands of journals available for researchers in the academic world; to choose the best one for your research focus, optimize between many standards or constraints you may find in any journal before reaching a decision about where to publish.

Presubmit & Submit

In some case your research may include a large amount of data on hand, which may increase the time of completing your paper to submit for a journal! If your experiment is still in progress, see if you can split your research into two parts. This will help you publish your study before your further studies are completed. This is a great way to speed up article publishing.

By the way, another way to accelerate paper publication process is to use services that provide peer review before submission. The feedback you will receive on your paper, will help you avoid and prevent negative comments from journal reviewers and editors.

You may also contact the selected journal in the pre-submission phase in a letter to ensure whether your paper would be a good fit for the journal without having to proceed through the entire submission and peer review process.

Any disregard to the guidelines of the target journal will cause delays in publication; prepare the cover letter, main text, references, figures and tables, and any supplementary information according to the formatting and writing rules of any journal.

If you write an effective cover letter to a journal good for your field, you will convince the editor to send your manuscript for review right away.

Follow up

If you have submitted your paper but haven’t received a response yet (the standard amount of time from submission to decision making is different among journals and fields), you can ask for your paper’s status from the editor or visit the journal’s website to make sure whether the process is extended.

Respond to Reviewers

Respond to reviewers and editors’ feedback in an thorough, clear, and polite way to reduce the likelihood of your paper being rejected or repeated for review, thus accelerating your paper publication process.

Wherever you are in the process of researching and writing, we hope that these tips will help to accelerate the publication of your manuscript.