When Peer Review Takes Forever: A Small Data Dive into Review Times in Psychology

At the end of the year, one usually wants to write something reflective and positive. This time, however, I decided to write about something that has been bothering me for a while 😊

As I mentioned before, one of my papers has been under review for more than a year. I submitted it to a journal in September 2024, and it was sent out for review. And then…nothing. For a long time, the submission system simply displayed a note saying that the review deadline had passed. No further updates. My emails to the editor, both via the submission system and to her personal email, remained unanswered.

In August 2025, almost one year later, I wrote again, this time asking to withdraw the paper from the journal. Unexpectedly, this message finally received a response. The editor apologized and explained that our manuscript had somehow been lost in the system, but that the reviews had already been completed. She recommended revising the paper. Interestingly, in her email she referred to it as a minor revision, while in the system it was listed as a major revision. In short, we could either continue working on the paper or withdraw it, she said she would understand either decision.

I decided to try revising it. Surely, it couldn’t all have gone that badly. I revised the paper according to the reviewers’ comments and resubmitted it for a second round in September 2025. And what happened next? Three and a half months later, the system now says: “Round 2 Status: A review is overdue.” And again - no responses to my emails 😊

Like many researchers in similar situations, I started wondering how common this really is. Of course, this is a large and complex topic, and I’m not ready to present a full-scale study yet (although it would be interesting). Instead, I decided to do a small exploratory analysis.

How Long Do Papers Wait? Evidence from One Journal

As an example, I took one psychology journal - the British Journal of Psychology. The choice was largely pragmatic rather than principled: it is a well-established psychology journal for which submission and publication dates were available. Using these data, I looked at basic statistics on review duration and how review times have changed in recent years (since 2018).

Across all available publications (submission dates were not available for every article), the average review-to-publication time was around 200 days. The distribution is shown in the figure below.

Fig. 1. Distribution of review time

Next, I examined how review times changed over the years. I used the median rather than the mean, since it is more robust to extreme values. The plot shows that from 2018 to 2023, review times increased substantially. In 2018, the median review time was about 180 days (meaning that half of the papers took more than six months). By 2022, it had increased to 240 days, and in 2023 there was a striking spike to 280 days. After that, review times started to decrease again. It would be interesting to understand what caused this jump in 2023—and why the situation seems to have improved afterward.

Fig.2. Median review time by year

Finally, I looked at whether review times differed by research topic. For simplicity, I used the topical classifications provided by OpenAlex and examined the median review time for the 15 most frequent topics.

Fig. 3. Median review time by topic

The longest median review times were observed for Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (290 days), followed by Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development (271 days).

Out of curiosity, I also examined the five papers with the longest review-to-publication times. The record holder was “‘So Help Me God’? Does oath swearing in courtroom scenarios impact trial outcomes?”, with a total duration of 1,298 days. It is worth noting that this paper is a Registered Report (Stage 2), which follows a different review process. The second longest was “Intolerance of uncertainty and novelty facilitated extinction: The impact of reinforcement schedule” (865 days). Third place went to another Stage 2 Registered Report: “Comparing the cognitive performance of action video game players and age-matched controls following a cognitively fatiguing task” (856 days). The top five is rounded out by “Automatic or controlled: How does disbelief in free will influence cognitive functioning?” (807 days).

If we take two years (730 days) as a reference point, about 1.3% of papers waited two years or longer before publication, and about 13% waited more than one year.

Of course, this quick analysis does not claim to be a real study. It would be interesting to examine whether review duration depends on the number of authors, their affiliations, or to compare multiple journals. There are a lot of existing research on this topic.

Still, somewhat surprisingly, this small exercise was reassuring: our case is not unique 😊 Even if it does lie somewhat beyond typical timelines. I still hope that next year will bring a decision on this paper. It is striking to realize that the experiment it is based on was conceived as early as 2021 and conducted in 2022. I also hope that it will not take another two and a half years for the paper to finally be published. It is an interesting piece of work, but not a groundbreaking one, and it is hard to see why it would require such a prolonged review process.