How long it takes to write a journal paper
I decided to start analysing the time that goes into preparation of journal articles. It is not too difficult a task, because I tend to keep timesheets for work tasks (nothing too elaborate, just an outlook calendar).
So it turns out that a 7900 word journal paper I submitted today took me in total 18 days to write, distributed over 4 months (Feb 4 to Jun 3, 2011), with an average weekly time investment of 5 hours. This included literature review and some reanalysis of the data, but excluded data collection, coding and main analysis which had been done earlier. The resultant paper was approx 12K words long, but had to be cut to just below 8K to fit the journal requirements.
I am using an Excel spreadsheet to analyse the data. It would be interesting to compare the time invested in a paper with the number of citations it gets, the type of journal it gets published in and how quickly it gets published (ie iterations/revisions requested), and other similar variables.
I would be interested to know how long it takes others to write a paper.
I’m doing applied math. It could take years to write a paper….
Andong He
June 29, 2011 at 15:04
18 days? So is that 18 * 24 hours = 432 hours? Or 7 hours a day over 18 days?
If 5 hours a week is your average than I’d suspect that it is 4 months * 4 weeks / month = 16 weeks * 5 = 80 hours. Does that seem correct?
Gman
January 24, 2012 at 20:19