How long does peer review take? Realistic expectations and ways to speed it up

“It’s been three months since I submitted my article and still nothing. Is that normal?”

Authors ask this question, and — in another form — so do editors: “Is our process slow, or is everyone like this?” An honest answer to either requires looking at the data.

What the data say

Fields differ enormously, but we have some well-measured examples. A 2024-2025 analysis of 57 health-policy journals reports these median times:

• To a reviewed first decision: 60.5 days (with a between-journal range of 21-263 days!)
• To final decision: 198 days
• Acceptance to online publication: 25.5 days

So “three months and nothing” is, unfortunately, statistically unremarkable. What stands out is the width of the range: of two journals in the same field, one can deliver a first decision in three weeks, the other in nine months. Which means duration is not a law of nature; it is largely the product of a journal’s process discipline.

Break the duration into its components and an interesting fact emerges: the actual writing of the review does not take long. According to Publons’ global report, a review, once accepted, is completed in an average of 19.1 days. So where is the rest of the 60-day first-decision clock? The answer is uncomfortable: in waiting. Waiting in the queue on the editor’s desk, waiting while reviewer invitations get declined, waiting while unanswered invitations time out. Another finding from the same report confirms it: the number of invitations required per completed review has risen markedly over the years — that is, the growing share of the timeline is not reviewing, but the search for reviewers.

Where the time disappears: four waiting pools

If you want to shorten your own journal’s timeline, tracking the total as a single number is not enough; you need to see four waiting pools separately:

1. Submission → desk review: The manuscript arrived — how many days before a human first looked at it? The back-and-forth over incomplete submissions counts here.
2. Desk review → reviewer assignment: The time the editor spends hunting for suitable reviewers. The entire invite-decline-reinvite loop.
3. Reviewer assignment → reports in: The time in the reviewer’s hands; the phase where reminders do their work.
4. Reports → decision: The reports are complete but the decision is pending. The most invisible pool, and often the most embarrassing.

In a manual process, none of these four numbers is known; all that is felt is that the total is “long.” In a systematic process, every stage’s entry and exit is on record, and the bottleneck is found by report, not by guess. Nasirus’s editorial dashboards lay that breakdown in front of you at a glance.

What you can speed up — and what you must not

Three of the four pools shrink substantially under process discipline:

• Rounds over incomplete submissions are reduced by well-designed required fields; the completeness check drops to minutes.
• The reviewer hunt is shortened by a pool on record: well-aimed suggestions, external review without opening an account, and unanswered invitations that close on their own while a new name is suggested in their place.
• The time in the reviewer’s hands is regulated by automatic reminders; on serious delay, cancelling the assignment and reassigning resolves things without making it personal.

The one thing that must not be sped up is the review itself. Pressuring reviewers to “turn it around in three days” ends in sloppier reports, and the weeks gained are paid for in quality. The aim is to protect the reviewer’s thinking time while driving every dead wait around it to zero.

Declaring your times: a small but potent step for journals

Journals that begin measuring their waiting pools find one more opportunity in front of them: declaring what they measure.

The sentence “Our average time to first decision: 6 weeks” sitting on the journal’s page does three jobs at once. It manages author expectations — uncertainty wears people down more than length does. It sets the journal apart — a journal that can declare its times has demonstrated command of its process, and strong authors factor that into where they submit. And it creates a healthy internal pressure — the declared number becomes a bar to defend.

The one condition is that the declaration come from real data. A “4 weeks” written in optimism works in reverse on the author entering week twelve. Hence the ordering matters: measure first, fix next, declare last.

A footnote: expected durations vary widely between fields. The review of an experimental science article and the review of a history monograph do not fit the same calendar. Ground your own declaration in your own field’s reality — in your own historical data, not other fields’ averages.

An honest note for authors

If you are an author wondering about a process: check whether the journal declares an average decision time on its site, and go by that; if it doesn’t, a polite status query before the three-month mark is considered reasonable. And about journals that keep you in perpetual uncertainty, know this: the problem is usually not bad faith but the absence of any infrastructure through which the journal can see its own process. The journals that answer “what’s my status?” within a minute are the ones reading that answer off a system — not out of an email archive.

If you are on the journal side and have never seen your four waiting-pool numbers, brace for the reckoning the first report brings. When you write in for a demo, include your journal’s annual submission count — we’ll build the sample dashboard to match.