The Peer Review Timeline

The editorial office verifies that the submission is complete: file formats, figure resolution, declarations, ethics statements, author details. Nothing scientific happens here, and nothing is read. This is also the stage that a sloppy submission fails, which returns the manuscript to you before it has been looked at. It is the only stage on this page you fully control.

What decides the duration

whether the files pass. A missing declaration or an unreadable figure sends the submission back with a request, and the clock restarts when you resubmit.

No published figures exist for how often submissions fail the technical check, so this page gives none.

The practical consequence

a pre-submission compliance pass costs an hour and can save a week here. That is what the manuscript checker is for.

An editor reads the paper and decides whether to send it out at all. At selective journals this is where most submissions end. Science reported a 15.0% review rate for research papers in 2025, meaning 85% were never sent to an external reviewer, and Nature states that most submissions are declined without being sent out for peer review. Screening is also, for the papers that fail it, the fastest possible answer.

Nature

a median of 8 days from submission to the first editorial decision, on its journal metrics page (the speed block carries no year label; adjacent blocks are 2025).

Nature Communications

a median of 9 days to first editorial decision, 2025.

PLOS ONE

a median of 32 days to first decision, and PLOS Medicine 67 days, from PLOS research metrics, 2025.

Desk rejections specifically

an average of 12 days, with half arriving within a week, from Huisman and Smits, Scientometrics 2017, based on 3,500 review experiences reported between 2013 and 2016.

eLife

a median of 8 days to a decision not to review, between January 2023 and January 2025, in its two-year model update.

This is where the waiting actually happens, and it is invisible from the author's side because the submission system shows the same status throughout. The editor invites referees one or a few at a time. Each invitation that is declined, or simply ignored until it times out, has to be replaced. Publons reported that editors sent an average of 2.4 invitations for every completed review in 2017, up from 1.9 in 2013, and that 75% of journal editors surveyed in 2016 said finding reviewers and getting them to accept was the hardest part of their job.

2.4 invitations per completed review in 2017, from ScholarOne data across publishers, in the Global State of Peer Review 2018 (Publons, now Clarivate).

Invitations sent grew 9.8% a year between 2013 and 2017 while accepted articles grew 4.9% a year, in the same report: the pool is being asked more often, not growing at the same rate.

Reasons reviewers decline, from 11,838 respondents in the same report: 70.6% cited the paper being outside their area of expertise, 42% cited being too busy with their own research.

One family-medicine journal tracked invitation acceptance falling from 44.7% in 2017 to 38.6% by July 2025, over 2,951 invitations, in Morley et al., PRiMER 2025.

What this means for you

a paper that sits at 'under review' for six weeks may not have been read by anyone yet. That is the normal failure mode, and it is why a plausible list of suggested reviewers genuinely helps.

Once a referee has agreed, the report itself is comparatively quick. Publons reported a median of 16.4 days and a mean of 19.1 days between a reviewer agreeing and delivering the review, over 2016 to 2018. The long total that authors experience is the sum of the invitation cycles, not of slow readers.

First decision overall, all fields

an average of 13 weeks, from Huisman and Smits 2017. 19% of authors had a decision within one month, 68% within three months, and 10% waited more than six months.

By field, in the same study

about 8 weeks in medicine, and 16 to 18 weeks in economics, the social sciences, mathematics and the humanities. The discipline you work in changes the expected wait more than the journal you picked.

Reviewers self-report a median of 5 hours writing each review, in the Global State of Peer Review 2018, and 65% of reviews take 1 to 5 hours according to Kovanis et al., PLOS ONE 2016.

Authors surveyed in conservation biology reported a typical turnaround of 14.4 weeks against a stated ideal of 6.4 weeks, with 86% wanting eight weeks or less: Maurer et al., PLOS ONE, from a 2014 survey of 461 respondents.

Most papers that are eventually published go round at least twice, and a meaningful share of the total elapsed time is time authors spend on the revision rather than time the journal spends on the paper.

Accepted papers went through an average of 2.03 review rounds and received 2.2 referee reports, in Huisman and Smits 2017.

Authors took an average of 39 days to prepare a revision in the same study, ranging from 29 days in public health to 64 days in economics and business.

Total review duration for accepted papers averaged 17 weeks across fields, from 12 weeks in medicine to 25 weeks in economics and business, in the same study. 53% concluded within three months and 81% within six.

In one large sample from the PLOS ONE neuroscience section, 51% of manuscripts were decided in the first round, 40% went to a second and 8% to a third: Teplitskiy et al., submissions from 2011 to 2012.

Most journals allow 60 to 90 days for a major revision and will grant an extension if you ask before the deadline. The response to reviewers template is the artefact this stage produces.

Copyediting, typesetting, proofs and scheduling. Shorter than it used to be at most publishers, and largely out of your hands beyond returning proofs quickly.

Frontiers reported an average of 32 days from acceptance to publication in its 2021 progress report.

Submission to acceptance, for comparison

a median of 321 days at Nature and 242 days at Nature Communications in 2025, and a median of 209 days to publication at PLOS ONE in 2025.

Across 3,482 biomedical journals indexed in PubMed, the median submission-to-acceptance interval was about 100 days and had been rising over time: Himmelstein, 2015.

Frontiers reported an average acceptance time of 96 days across all its journals in its 2024 annual report.

There is no published rule for this, so the guidance below is a convention rather than a sourced figure. What the figures above do support is that a first decision commonly takes around three months, and that silence at eight weeks is not evidence that anything has gone wrong.

Check the journal's own stated target first. Many publish a median time to first decision, and a polite enquiry lands better when it references their number rather than your patience.

A first enquiry at roughly three months for a first decision is reasonable at most journals, and earlier at a journal that advertises a fast turnaround.

Keep it to three sentences

the manuscript ID, the submission date, and a request for an update on the expected timeline. No reference to how long you have waited.

Chase again no more often than monthly. Editorial offices answer status queries manually, and a weekly email consumes the time you want spent on your paper.

Withdrawing to submit elsewhere is legitimate after a long unexplained delay, but withdraw formally and in writing before you submit anywhere else. Simultaneous submission is a serious breach at every publisher.