Department of Biology and the Ecology Center, Utah State University, 5305 Old Main Hill, Logan, Utah 84322-5305, USA.
Conserv Biol. 2010 Apr;24(2):615-20. doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01424.x. Epub 2010 Jan 11.
Timely dissemination of scientific findings depends not only on rapid publication of submitted manuscripts, a topic which has received much discussion, but also on rapid submission of research after the research is completed. We measured submission delay (time from the last date of data collection to the submission of a manuscript) for every paper from 14 journals in 2007 and compared these submission delays among four fields of biology (conservation, taxonomy, behavior, and evolution). Manuscripts published in leading journals in the field of conservation biology have the longest delays in publication of accepted manuscripts and the longest intervals between completion of research and submission of the manuscript. Delay in manuscript submission accounts for more than half of the total time from last date of data collection to publication. Across fields, the number of authors was significantly negatively correlated with submission delay, but conservation journals had the second highest number of authors and the greatest submission delay, so submission of conservation manuscripts was not hindered by a shortage of collaboration relative to other fields. Rejection rates were greater in conservation journals than in behavior and evolution, but rejection times were faster; thus, there were no obvious net differences among fields in the time papers spent waiting to be rejected. Publication delay has been reduced significantly in the last 7 years, but was still greater in conservation journals than in any of the other three fields we studied. Thus, the urgent field of conservation biology is hindered in both preparation and publication of manuscripts.
科学发现的及时传播不仅取决于提交稿件的快速发表，这是一个已经讨论了很多的话题，还取决于研究完成后研究的快速提交。我们测量了 2007 年来自 14 种期刊的每篇论文的提交延迟（从最后一次数据收集到提交稿件的时间），并比较了这四个生物学领域（保护生物学、分类学、行为学和进化生物学）之间的提交延迟。在保护生物学领域的主流期刊上发表的论文，其已接受稿件的出版延迟最长，研究完成到提交稿件的间隔时间也最长。稿件提交延迟占从最后一次数据收集到出版的总时间的一半以上。在各个领域，作者数量与提交延迟呈显著负相关，但保护学杂志的作者数量第二多，提交延迟最大，因此，与其他领域相比，保护学论文的提交并没有因合作不足而受到阻碍。保护学杂志的拒稿率高于行为学和进化生物学杂志，但拒稿时间更快；因此，在等待被拒稿的时间方面，各个领域之间并没有明显的净差异。在过去的 7 年中，出版延迟已经显著减少，但在保护学杂志中仍然高于我们研究的其他三个领域。因此，保护生物学这一紧迫领域在论文的准备和发表方面都受到了阻碍。
