After submitting a paper to an astronomy journal like MNRAS, ApJ, A&A, PASP it is quite typical to receive a referee report within 1-2 months.
A search of my emails confirms this – green, orange, blue histograms are astronomy journals:
For statistics journals, the waiting times can be much longer in my experience. For Statistics Surveys, and another paper not shown in the above, I waited for almost a year! That’s quite a shocking cultural difference. What do statisticians do all day?
I also plotted in black how long I take between receiving a request for reviewing and submitting the review. I typically do it on the same day or the next.
I am apparently not a typical reviewer!
Oh – this might be a way to identify me as your reviewer 🙂
Postscript: How did I make this histogram? I exported my emails and converted them to notmuch. Then I used the search feature with the various journals/platforms and exported the results as text. I fed this text to a LLM to produce CSV files (so this might be unreliable). Then I used a python script to make the plot.
Leave a Reply