Does the handling time of scientific papers relate to their academic impact and social attention? Evidence from Nature, Science, and PNAS

The time required for peer review is a crucial factor for researchers when deciding where to submit their manuscripts, as it is also considered an important predictor of paper impact. This paper analyses the handling time of academic papers at the individual paper level, focusing on three key indicators: editorial handling time, processing handling time, and total handling time. Unlike previous studies that primarily examined the simple correlation between handling time and academic impact of academic papers, this paper uses a negative binomial regression model to analyse the data while controlling for various factors related to total citations. Further, we explore the relationship between handling time and social attention. The dataset used in this study comprises 49,881 papers classified as ‘articles’ and published between 2011 and 2020 in three prestigious journals: Nature, Science, and PNAS. Our main findings reveal significant negative associations between the three measures of handling time and both impact and attention, except that processing handling time and attention have a significant positive relationship. Additionally, heterogeneity analyses indicate that these relationships are affected by the journal, subject, and affiliation. This empirical analysis of handling time's effect on academic impact and social attention expands upon the insights gained from previous research and may stimulate changes in some journal editorial policies to accelerate publishing speed.