I am the author of a 12-page double-column manuscript submitted to IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics. Here is the record of the updates within the journal online system, corresponding to the aforementioned manuscript:
Submission Finalization: 7th Aug. 2015
Under Review: 11th Aug. 2015
Awaiting EIC Decision: 16th Sep. 2015
The journal has declared that the authors might expect the result between 8 up to 10 weeks after the submission. But how is it possible to review a 12-page manuscript with a 6-page supplementary material just within one month?
With a full sense of anxiety, I might think that it would be a sinister sign for the early rejection of the manuscript.
Does anybody have any experience with this journal or similar transaction ones, with such very short review-to-result time interval, to evaluate my situation?
Answer
I cannot make any statement about this journal and this may depend somewhat on the field, but so far I never spent more than a day’s work on any review. The main problem why reviews take so long is not that the review itself actually takes that long, but that reviewers need to find time for the review given their numerous other duties.
Therefore it’s entirely possible that a referee reviews a paper within a day – maybe somewhat more, depending on the field – if they have time at hand. This needs not have to do anything with the review being sloppy or the paper being bad; it’s just a question of luck. I know of one example where a paper for Physical Review Letters (a high-level physics journal) went from submission to publication in something around ten days. Also, one of my papers once received a positive review within four days.
If the journal expects the review process to take eight to ten weeks, then a month sounds entirely plausible. It’s not even outstandingly short.
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