Expedited editorial decision in COVID-19 pandemic

Zhuanlan Sun, Sheng Liu, Yiwei Li and Chao Ma

Journal of Informetrics, 2023, vol. 17, issue 1

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic and its resultant lockdowns have interrupted the way scientists live and work. This nevertheless caused an unforeseen impact of COVID-19: the pandemic substantially increased editorial speed. Here, we causally identify the impact of the pandemic on the editorial decision time, based on a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity (RD) design that compares (N = 339,199) papers submitted in the lead-up to and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that editors make acceptance decisions significantly quicker after the pandemic, reducing the editorial decision time of revised papers by 8.9 days on average. The pandemic, however, has unequal impacts on editors. The results reveal a larger reduction in editorial decision time for editors of high-tier journals, in the field of social science, or with busy work schedules. Finally, our findings also allude to the potential for the increase of editorial speed, and will stimulate policy changes in scientific enterprises that strive for accelerated publishing.

Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; Work from home; Editorial decision; Regression discontinuity; Scientific publishing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175115772300007X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:17:y:2023:i:1:s175115772300007x

DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2023.101382

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Informetrics is currently edited by Leo Egghe

More articles in Journal of Informetrics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().