Day of the week effect in paper submission/acceptance/rejection to/in/by peer review journals

TL;DR

This study analyzes submission and acceptance patterns in a chemical journal, revealing weekday effects and proposing an entropy-based measure to quantify submission disorder.

Contribution

It introduces a novel entropy-based metric to assess the disorder in paper submission processes and identifies specific weekday effects on submission and acceptance rates.

Findings

Wednesday is the most common submission day.

Tuesday submissions have higher acceptance rates.

Weekend days are less favorable for submission.

Abstract

This paper aims at providing an introduction to the behavior of authors submitting a paper to a scientific journal. Dates of electronic submission of papers to the Journal of the Serbian Chemical Society have been recorded from the 1st January 2013 till the 31st December 2014, thus over 2 years. There is no Monday or Friday effect like in financial markets, but rather a Tuesday-Wednesday effect occurs: papers are more often submitted on Wednesday; however, the relative number of going to be accepted papers is larger if these are submitted on Tuesday. On the other hand, weekend days (Saturday and Sunday) are not the best days to finalize and submit manuscripts. An interpretation based on the type of submitted work ("experimental chemistry") and on the influence of (senior) coauthors is presented. A thermodynamic connection is proposed within an entropy context. A (new) entropic distance is defined in order to measure the "opaqueness" = disorder) of the submission process.