The true latency of biomedical research papers

It is very difficult to get a data-driven estimate of the time needed, on average, to publish a research paper in a biomedical area. This difficulty arises because the metrics reported by individual journals, such as (when available) submission-to-acceptance or submission-to-publication times, are not designed to capture the entire journey of a manuscript, that often faces one or more rejections before finding acceptance in a journal. Consequently, there is a lack of published data, statistics and scientific literature about the actual overall time required, on average, for publication. This study aims at filling this gap across all biomedical research areas by providing a reliable estimate of the time from the moment a new manuscript is drafted and ready for submission to the moment it is actually published. This is done by integrating data from multiple databases to reconstruct the complete journey of each manuscript. Specifically, data from pre-print repositories, namely bioRxiv and MedRxiv, were exploited to link the first version of 129,769 manuscripts, to their published version (involving 4459 peer-reviewed journals), accessed through Europe PubMed Central. As a results, it was estimated a median time for publication of 199 days overall, with a wide variability among different categories, ranging from 238 days in the case of radiology and imaging to 139 days for infectious diseases (which is actually shortened by COVID-19 papers) or 150 days in the case of biochemistry, which was found to be the second-fastest category. It was also found an increasing trend in publication time, with a 4-weeks increase from 2014 to 2019.