Sun Zhuanlan, Liu Sheng, Li Yiwei, Ma Chao
Institute of High-Quality Development Evaluation, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210003, China.
Department of Marketing and International Business, Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong, China.
J Informetr. 2023 Feb;17(1):101382. doi: 10.1016/j.joi.2023.101382. Epub 2023 Jan 16.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its resultant lockdowns have interrupted the way scientists live and work. This nevertheless caused an unforeseen impact of COVID-19: the pandemic substantially increased editorial speed. Here, we causally identify the impact of the pandemic on the editorial decision time, based on a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity (RD) design that compares ( = 339,199) papers submitted in the lead-up to and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that editors make acceptance decisions significantly quicker after the pandemic, reducing the editorial decision time of revised papers by 8.9 days on average. The pandemic, however, has unequal impacts on editors. The results reveal a larger reduction in editorial decision time for editors of high-tier journals, in the field of social science, or with busy work schedules. Finally, our findings also allude to the potential for the increase of editorial speed, and will stimulate policy changes in scientific enterprises that strive for accelerated publishing.
新冠疫情及其导致的封锁措施扰乱了科学家的生活和工作方式。然而，这也造成了新冠疫情一个意想不到的影响：疫情大幅提高了编辑速度。在此，我们基于一种准实验回归断点（RD）设计，通过比较在新冠疫情前后提交的（ = 339,199）论文，因果性地确定了疫情对编辑决策时间的影响。我们发现，疫情之后编辑做出录用决定的速度显著加快，修订稿件的编辑决策时间平均减少了8.9天。然而，疫情对编辑的影响并不均衡。结果显示，对于顶级期刊的编辑、社会科学领域的编辑或工作安排繁忙的编辑，其编辑决策时间的减少幅度更大。最后，我们的研究结果还暗示了编辑速度提高的可能性，并将促使致力于加快出版速度的科研企业进行政策变革。
