I submitted a manuscript on July 18 of 2017 and it is under review since 22 of august of 2017. On January 15 I received a reply from the editor:
Sergio,
Thanks for your message. The review process can sometimes be slow as it depends on reviews. All I can say is we are still waiting for reviews to be submitted.
I also have another paper under open review her eArticle VEIN v0.2.2: an R package for bottom-up Vehicular Emissions ...
but it has been difficult to get reviewsHow much time should I wait for an article to be reviewed?
Should I submit to elsewhere?
Should I choose better reviewers?
Thanks
You could assist the editor by choosing better and willing reviewers who do not have a conflict of interest e.g. You must not have worked or published with the selected reviewer in the past 3 years etc. If that again proves to be futile as some journals prefer to nominate their reviewers instead of relying on the list that you provide, perhaps you should consider withdrawing the paper and publishing it elsewhere. This is a serious issue in South Africa, especially concerning postdoctoral fellows whose performance is measured based on the number of publications produced and published (not submitted) per year.
On average it takes between 6 and 24 months to get published from the first date of submission.
It depends on the the editor of the journal, the ranking of the journal, the reviewers. In high ranked journal they gave a limited time tot the reviewers and then send a notice for delaying until the reviewers send their comments, also the article research quality and interesting points let some editors to hurry up the reviewing process. Also, the editorial office for following all submitted papers for review, so this takes form one month to one year for the the reasons I mentioned before.
I agree with Saad and have had similar expiriences. I find the Elsevier journals stay on top of things and move each paper through the process in a reasonable amount of time. However, I've worked with a couple of other journals that i found I needed to contact regularly (every month or two) to make sure they were following up with the reviewers, something it was clear they were not doing. In fact, a year ago I had a paper in one of these journals which took 6 months to find a second reviewer. As for going to another journal as you suggest, I'm not sure how that would work since I've never done that. You may be able to request that, and perhaps they would grant you that, but they may also claim that they have invested time into your manuscript and thus not be willing to release it until it goes through the process.
It also depends on why you want something published in a particular place. I find 4/5 years is not uncommon if you want to be published as part of a group, whether conference proceedings or as a specialist part of a team's report.
My advice, unless you really need to get the paper out sooner, is to wait for the process to work through. Unless you are a very high ranked researcher it is often career suicide to get a reputation for awkwardness since you may then find that your papers get reviewed very quickly and rejected. So while a polite request to either speed things up or allow you to withdraw the paper might be acceptable it is probably better to let things run their course, frustrating as that is.
Thank you for your advices, they are very important to me, I sometimes feel anxious. It seems that, to get a paper published, it is not only about writting a good paper, but also being polite and I believe that you got to be smart for suggesting good reviewers. I've sent an email to the editor. Lets wait for the best. Thanks
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