Geophysics publication turnaround trimmed by more than 50%

13 July 2007—Thanks to the support of the past two Executive Committees and the hard work of the SEG publication staff, Geophysics has cleared a backlog of accepted papers by publishing approximately twice as many papers per issue (60) than usual in five of the past seven issues, according to SEG Editor Yonghe Sun.

The publication process has been streamlined, and now benefits from online tracking and a well-defined turnaround schedule at each stage of review and production. Papers are published daily online within about 2.5 months of acceptance, instead of the previous six months on a bimonthly basis (Figure 1).

The overall quality of a journal depends in large part on its efficiency. Accelerated review and revision schedules were implemented for Geophysics during 2005 and enforced in early 2006. Since then, the median time from submission of an article to the first decision has been reduced to 7.5 weeks (Figure 2) from the 18 weeks in 2004. The median time from submission to acceptance has been reduced to six months (Figure 3) from 13.5 months in 2004.

Sun credited the excellent teamwork of the authors, editors, reviewers, and SEG staff for reducing the median time from submission to publication—roughly 8.5 months (Figure 4) from 20 months in 2004. A large majority of the accepted papers now are published within one year of submission.

To learn more about submitting papers for consideration in Geophysics, please visit http://www.segdl.org/geophysics/.