Environmental science was also pretty slow, though nowhere near math. The problem there was that “environmental science” includes so many fields – from chemistry to geology to weather – that there were only so many qualified reviewers to go around, and those reviewers were typically working for several journals in addition to doing their own work.

With the exception of those two, though, the biggest predictor of speedy turn-around was the editor in charge of the manuscript. Some editors I would e-mail and call over and over again with no response, others would unilaterally call the reviewers and say that they wanted reviews quicker than we normally required or simply cancel slow reviewers to get new ones. You can guess which kind we editorial assistants preferred. I always felt guilty when manuscripts started getting older, but after a certain point I couldn’t badger the editors/reviewers. The worst offenders didn’t care to begin with, and if they got irritated by a lowly EA they would slow down even more. It was very unprofessional. Still, most editors weren’t like that. I’m happy to say our managing editor ran a pretty tight ship.

This reminds me, I ought to check up on that longish piece I submitted to the Journal of the Societe Royalis- Americanus back in 1992 or so. I thought it was a long shot myself back then and said so in my note to the editor, but not THAT much of a long shot.

As for historians and articles v. books, I think tenure means not having to care about that disjunction again. Articles are just fine, if they’re satisfying to do and say what you want them to say.

I see what you’re saying, Matt, about articles. I think it’s a really interesting point. But, the usefulness of books is something that varies subfield-by-subfield. As a North American Anglophone historian, it’s still relatively easy for me to find a publisher–there are lots of them out there, by comparison to my colleagues and friends who work in other national histories and/or languages. I also think that there are a lot of ideas in my field that profit from development over 200 or 300 (or on rare occasions, 400) pages.

I think it’s going to take a tsunami of economic change for historians to give up their books. I suspect that for the rest of my career (30 years or so), articles will continue to be considered the farm club and books the show. The exception to this is articles that are either published in leading multi-subfield journals, and/or articles that get traction and end up being anthologized or recognized as making an important contribution in their own right. (But there are a lot more books published each year than articles like the exceptions I describe.)

The question we should ask as a discipline is this – What provides more ‘oxygen’ for research in a field or subfield: several really great articles that are in dialog or debate with one another or several monographs doing the same thing? It seems to me that articles would be superior in this regard. They can deal with a discrete topics and be turned around quickly (a couple of years) relative to monographs (which take what, five-six years?). Some topics are probably better served by a monograph length treatment, but I’d bet two-thirds of the research in any field would be equally well served by an article.

And don’t get me started on the time from acceptance to publication–I think some journals in my field are up to a couple years between the decision and the printing!

I did recently withdraw an article from consideration at a journal that had not acted on it for nearly eight months, because it was solicited by another journal for a special issue. It will be published in journal number two, I just got the page proofs today.

Thanks to Gavin for sending on that link to the journal wiki. I scanned it–it looks like the ones I know to be notoriously slow are listed as notoriously slow there.

If there are any journal editors or people with insight into this, I’d appreciate hearing from you, but: why on earth send an article out to three readers when it’s really only one reader whose opinion counts? It seems to me that an article that has satisfied the concerns of 2/3 of its readers should proceed to publication. I know it’s more complex than just “majority vote,” but why is the majority not heeded in these cases?

(Full disclosure: I once had an article rejected after winning over 2/3 of the readers, so this in particular chaps my a$$. The one nay vote in my case admitted that I had addressed each and every one of all of the readers’ concerns–he just personally was unconvinced of my argument. The editor of the journal sent an odd, convoluted explanation for this decision, saying that the one nay vote was from a Really Important Person Who Must Not Be Crossed. That seemed totally chicken$hit to me, but the bigger question I came away with was: is it the job of every article that’s published to convince absolutely every reader that it’s 100% correct? Or is it enough to raise interesting questions with enough evidence and scholarship and thought, and we just accept that no article will ever please absolutely every reader?)