Do we want a canonical question for general journal workflows?

Question

We often get questions from people who are not aware how a journal works and do not understand some step in the editiorial process¹, think some step takes too long² or are just very worried³. We also get some questions where a step in the editorial process took ridiculously long⁴. (e.g., a month for initial quality check) or questions asking for expected times for each step for a specific journal⁴ (10 k only link).

The problem with these questions is that we can answer most of them only by reiterating one of the following:

• We cannot possibly predict the editorial decision.
• Depending on the field, publisher and journal, that’s normal / outrageously long.
• The status message probably means that [the editor has to evaluate the reviews].

As different journals or editorial systems use different status messages, and review times vary greatly across fields, this leads to questions that aren’t exactly duplicates of each other but could all be duplicates of a non-existing master question. I here propose to create such a canonical question.

We may use it as a duplicate for questions such as the above, which does not only avoid us dealing with such questions but also helps the asker. It may keep some askers from asking in the first place or help them to focus their question on what is not covered by the canonical question.

This question and answer shall be a community wiki and cover:

• What is the typical workflow of a journal?
• How are the individual steps of this workflow named in different editiorial systems?
• What are the typical durations of individual steps, if they can be given at all? How do they roughly depend on the field?

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This is a feature-request, i.e., you can indicate approval or opposition by voting on the question.

Answer 1

I created the question and an answer as proposed:
What does the typical workflow of a journal look like?

I think that this actual realisation demonstrates that splitting this question would not be beneficial as it does not increase the additional information on alternative names and durations do not diminish the readability and can be easily skipped by readers who are not interested in them.

Please contribute by improving question and answer and in particular by filling the list of alternative names of steps in the journal workflow.

Answer 2

I agree with the comments that there are multiple topics in the proposed question. In this case, I think this is not only fine, but actually desirable.

Because this question will deviate from our general "policies" in a number of ways, that is why having a meta discussion first is helpful. There is nothing wrong with breaking our own rules when we as a group want.

People will always point to exceptions and use it to justify why their question is a good fit. Hopefully we will be able to steer then to meta posts that will explain how things work.

Answer 3

I am also in favor of separate questions with links to one another, as suggested by Energy Numbers, but for a different reason.

I think pointing a user to a canonical question whose answer is very long, with many parts, is confusing for users. It's a little bit like if a student asks me a question about the Fourier transform, and in answer, I hand them the signal processing textbook. I would prefer to hand them a copy of just the relevant chapter, possibly with an additional comment noting the most relevant subsection...

I always feel a little bad pointing a user with a very focused graduate admissions question to the lengthy canonical "admissions process" question, for this reason.

Answer 4

Put them as three separate questions. Put links in each, to the others.

Then go through old, related questions, and where appropriate ruthlessly close them as duplicates of the new canonical questions.

Creating a triple-question in one would create a broken window. It would linger and create problems from then on, until we relented and broke it up into separate questions. So let's just start with separate questions in the first place, and cut out all of the intervening nonsense.

No amount of disclaimers about "special questions" or "unique exemptions" will prevent a multi-question question from being cited by others as a precedent. And they'd be absolutely right to do so: a precedent is exactly what it would be.

We already frequently get multiple questions in one. Let's not encourage it, and let's not justify it.