As a reviewer, how much time do you spend for reviewing the papers sent to you?
What factors influence that period?
Interesting question.
It depends first on the quality required by the journal or conference.
For the best journals in my field (i.e. IEEE) I need roughly between 10 minutes and 4 hours (at the beininning I also sometimes spent up to 8 hours on some papers) to review a paper with a rough average of maybe 1 hour per paper.
After extensive reviewing experience (approaching 500 reviews for various journals) I am able to quickly spot in a few minutes poor papers by the journal standard (often this pops up from the title and abstract) and write down in a few minutes a short report pointing out paper weaknesses.
If the paper passes this first filter, the most time consumming is to understand the technical content. If the paper is welll written and organized this time is around one hour. Then I may need generally up to one hour to write down a careful review.
The most time consumming are the papers with borderline contributions, which require major revisions, or papers with good ideas shadowed by average/poor presentation (which I do not want to reject as some English-native reviewers).
If I feel the authors submit a half-baked paper or are "in search for feedback and ideas" I also spend less time on the paper.
The reviewing time depend on many factors e.g. quality of the journal, paper presentation quality, fit between the paper topic and your competences, mathematical challenge (today one witnesses an increasing number of mathematicians who wrote really challenging papers which require first getting used with the mathematical concepts), briefly check previous works by the same authors to assess the novelty of the contribution, etc.
For some papers the time spent is rewarding as you also learn a lot about different approaches being proposed.
Some papers are difficult to decision and I may come back to the draft review after 1-2 weeks with fresh mind.
I rarely return my assessment after the deadline (often set to 4 weeks).
Maximum one month. One can take more time but it is not at all a good habit to unnecessarily hold the MSS for many months.
Interesting question.
It depends first on the quality required by the journal or conference.
For the best journals in my field (i.e. IEEE) I need roughly between 10 minutes and 4 hours (at the beininning I also sometimes spent up to 8 hours on some papers) to review a paper with a rough average of maybe 1 hour per paper.
After extensive reviewing experience (approaching 500 reviews for various journals) I am able to quickly spot in a few minutes poor papers by the journal standard (often this pops up from the title and abstract) and write down in a few minutes a short report pointing out paper weaknesses.
If the paper passes this first filter, the most time consumming is to understand the technical content. If the paper is welll written and organized this time is around one hour. Then I may need generally up to one hour to write down a careful review.
The most time consumming are the papers with borderline contributions, which require major revisions, or papers with good ideas shadowed by average/poor presentation (which I do not want to reject as some English-native reviewers).
If I feel the authors submit a half-baked paper or are "in search for feedback and ideas" I also spend less time on the paper.
The reviewing time depend on many factors e.g. quality of the journal, paper presentation quality, fit between the paper topic and your competences, mathematical challenge (today one witnesses an increasing number of mathematicians who wrote really challenging papers which require first getting used with the mathematical concepts), briefly check previous works by the same authors to assess the novelty of the contribution, etc.
For some papers the time spent is rewarding as you also learn a lot about different approaches being proposed.
Some papers are difficult to decision and I may come back to the draft review after 1-2 weeks with fresh mind.
I rarely return my assessment after the deadline (often set to 4 weeks).
it depends topic content and my one knowledge level in that field. I feel 4 hrs are enough.
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