Evaluation of Issues Affecting Time Between Study Completion, Manuscript Submission, Acceptance, and Publication in Medical Journals

Introduction: Difficulty in finding the appropriate journal, adherence to the formatting differences between various journals, publication fees, delay in acceptance/rejection, etc., are a few reasons due to which much research is not published or when published the data in the research may become outdated. There are no studies to find out the issues which affect the time delay between study completion, submission to the journal, acceptance by the journal, and publication. With this background, we conducted this study. Methods: This study was exempted by the Ethics committee as it was based on online data. Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2020 (Clarivate analytics), CiteScore, and Google Scholar were used to sort the high-, moderate-, and low-impact factor journals. Forty-five journals each from high-, medium- and low-impact factors (h-index median, Google Scholar Metrics h5-index) were selected. Similarly, 15 predatory scientific journals were chosen. Journals with medical science backgrounds were chosen by randomization. Only original research articles were included. From each journal, five articles were chosen randomly from the latest issue pre-pandemic. The search was performed from April 2021 to June 2021. Variables analyzed were indexing of the journal, publication fees, level of impact factor, specialty domain, number of editors, frequency per year, date of study completion, date of submission, date of acceptance, date of publication, and h-index median. Data were compiled in Microsoft Excel Workbook (Microsoft, Redmond, WA, USA) and analyzed using IBM Corp. Released 2019. IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 26.0. Armonk, NY: IBM Corp. Variables of time were represented as median and interquartile range, and the number of journals and processing fees for publication were descriptively analyzed. Results: Out of 60 journals selected, 300 original articles were analyzed. There were 26 specialty-wise journals; the commonest was multispecialty journals. The fastest time from study completion to submission, submission to acceptance, submission to publication, and acceptance to publication was 15.5, 30, 61, and 0 days, respectively, and the slowest duration was 1636, 452, 615, and 456 days, respectively. PubMed indexed journals had a higher number of editors, h5-index, and h5 median, and slower time for acceptance and publication compared to non-PubMed indexed journals (p<0.05). Predatory journals had a lower h5-index and h5 median along with faster time to acceptance and publication compared to high and moderate impact factor journals (p<0.05). Journal with faster acceptance had faster publication as well (r=0.85), but no impact of the number of editors, number of issues per year (frequency), and publication fees with time to acceptance and publication. Conclusion: Though PubMed indexed journals with a greater number of editors and high fees are slower to publish articles but they are a safe option for researchers. The impact factor does not effect the speed of publication for non-predatory journals. Paying high fees and choosing a journal with more issues per year does not ensure quick publication to the researchers.