Since January 1996, manuscript submission to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has been changed to three tracks:
The manuscripts submitted through Tracks I and II are reviewed by qualified referees selected by "communicator" members and "editor" members, respectively, while those submitted through Track III are reviewed by a knowledgeable colleague of the "contributor" member prior to the submission.
This change has benefited authors who do not know or have no connection with academy members, since they can directly submit their manuscripts to the Proceedings through Track II. But one may ask whether a manuscript is published faster if the author knows the member-editor.
To answer this question, I checked three issues of the Proceedings (Vol. 95, Nos. 1 to 3, published on January 6, January 20, and February 3, 1998, respectively) and counted the number of days from submission to publication of a manuscript. The result indicates that ...
