Modeling time-to-acceptance for ISI-indexed journals in the profession of library & information science

Abstract

There are many factors affecting review duration after a paper has been submitted to a journal. Developing a time-to-acceptance model of each journal for the whole time span from submission to acceptance can help researchers when they are selecting journals to publish research results, as well as help editors when they are optimizing workflow and strategy. Using ISI-indexed journals in the profession of library and information science as an example, this study aims to explore the possible patterns of time-to-acceptance for refereed articles. Based on the theories of maximum likelihood estimation, this article models probability distributions for the retrieved data through the R package fitdistrplus. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is further used to determine if the distribution for each journal can be accepted.