Date-Stamp	Reported Status
24 September	New Submission
25 September	Editor Assigned
5 October	Reviewers Assigned
12 October	Under review
15 October	Reviewers Assigned
16 October	Under review
10 January	Under review

On 15 October, the reported status of my probability paper reverted from Under review to Reviewers Assigned. That change means that at least one reviewer who had accepted the assignment has since withdrawn. Since the reported status of my paper has ceased to be monotonic, I'm not going to post a separate entry for each change, but will just up-date the table above until the status becomes Reviews Completed.

The reported status and its date-stamp have remained unchanged since 16 October. Since the editor moved relatively rapidly between receipt of the paper and assigning it to reviewers, I'm going to infer that the editor is likely diligent and that the reported status would have been changed had all reviews been returned, or had a reviewer withdrawn since 16 October.

I've read of one journal that requests that reviews be returned within two weeks, but more typically journals ask that they be returned within three weeks, within four weeks, or within a month. I know that many reviewers fail to meet these requests.

I've seen very little data on how long the typical review takes; that data was not partitioned according to outcomes. Useful data partitioned according to whether the review were competent is surely not available.

The reported status and its date-stamp remain unchanged after the passage of two months.

24 December represented the third mensiversary of the most recent submission of my paper. By itself, three months is not a bad figure; in some cases, it might be a month before an editor had read a paper, and it might take another two months to find reviewers.

But 25 December represented the ten-week mark for the paper's reported status of Under review; that is quite a long time. I sent e.mail to the Journals Editorial Office:

For ten weeks, the reported status of my paper has been Under review. Within what interval does your journal ask reviewers to complete their reviews?

My question wasn't rhetorical. (I generally try to avoid rhetorical questions.) It is possible that reviewers are typically given a rather long time by this particular journal; it is also possible that a decision was made to suggest an atypical length of time to one or both reviewers.

The first reply from the Journals Editorial Office, in the morning of 27 December, perfectly failed to answer my question. So I swiftly reïterated my query. This morning, I received what I believe to be the best response that the Office might give:

Please be advised that we are sending reminders to reviewer after 3, 8 and 13 days upon the acceptance of the invitation. More than, we escalate it to the Editor for further action.

I'm surprised that reminders should be sent at three days and at eight, and I'm surprised that escalation should occur at less than three weeks.

But, in any case, as more than ten weeks have past, by the standards of the JEO, at least one of the reviews is wildly overdue. I do not know what the editor imagines.

In the late after-noon of 8 January, I sent e.mail to the handling editor, which message read

My paper has now begun its thirteenth week since the status was last changed to Under review. This span seems quite excessive.

The handling editor responded on 10 January:

One reviewer is very late, despite the numerous reminders sent. We are considering now what to do to speed up the process.
Thanks for your patience,
[editor name]

Sometime during 11 January, the reported status of my paper became Under review with a date-stamp of 10 January. I did not observe an interval when the reported status was Reviewers assigned between when last the date-stamp was 16 October and when the date-stamp became 10 January.

Tags: papers

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