While mulling over ideas for a group project in a graduate-level class in community ecology in 2007, PhD student Ryan O’Donnell recalled a question that had been nagging him for years. It was about a 2002 paper that examined how long it took for original scientific findings to get published in peer-reviewed literature, which showed that the lag time from submission to publication—the so-called “publication delay”—was several months longer for conservation and applied ecology journals than for three other biological subdisciplines (Nature, 420:15; 2002). But O’Donnell, who was studying the genetics of leopard frogs at Utah State University in Logan, figured that was only half the story.
Well before a paper passed into the hands of a journal editor, O’Donnell figured, there could be a lengthy hold up between when researchers completed a project and when they first submitted their manuscript. Yet no one had ever systematically investigated this additional ...
