time management - Journal publishing timetables

I am about to submit my first article to a peer-reviewed journal. I have basically already decided which one, but I have a shortlist and am still in principle considering my options. One of the questions I have is about the timetable for eventual publication. What should I expect? (In the long run, it probably won't make a large difference, but for me, right now, it would be nice to get something out the door this side of New Year if it is at all possible.)

I am puzzled by the lack of information about timetables and deadlines on the sites of these journals. I have looked at journals from related fields in the past and they all seem to be very secretive (or undecided?) about these things. Is this on purpose?

I guess I can infer something from previous publication dates -- a biannual which was last published in May might be slated for a next issue in November and probably have a deadline several weeks before that, which I probably won't make (it is now late August and the review process would apparently take several months). But why don't they simply put a date up front so authors won't have to fret?

Would it be out of line to email the editor of the journal and ask about the planned deadlines for the next couple of issues?

Answer

In most fields and for most journals, there is no time-table because it takes as long as it takes.

This means that after they receive your paper, they will send it out to a few referees, which have to be found first. How long finding referees takes is not under the control of the journal editors - they have to ask people until three of them said "yes".

Then, the referees have to write the review. Typically, they have about 3 months of time for that, and a request for extension is almost always granted. So think of it more like 6 months. Exceptions apply here (e.g., for the journal "Science", who manage to enforce shorter reviewing times).

Then your paper maybe accepted only conditional to changes. You do the changes within a month or so, and then reviewing starts again. So there goes another 3-6 months in addition to the time that the editor needs for organizing the process.

This means that for most reputable journals, there is a long pipeline of papers in-progress and whenever they make a new issue that is not a special issue, they take some papers that already went through the process and publish them. There can be a substatial "out-queue" of these papers, which is why some publishers came up with the concept of already publishing "done" papers before the paper has a journal issue assigned (e.g., for Springer, this is called "Online First").

As an example, in computer science, an overall time span of 1-3 years is common.

As a bottom line, the time to publish can only be influenced by the journal editors up to a certain, small, degree, e.g., how swiftly the editor performs actions whenever there is something that she can do at the respective point in time. So publishing a time line would make little sense.