Time to Accept It: publishing in the Journal of Statistical Software

I’m reblogging this article mostly for myself. If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll see that recently I published an article on organizing R code that mentioned using packages to organize that code. One of the advantages of doing so is that the work you’ve done is easily distributed. If the methods are novel in some way, you may even get a paper in J. Stat. Soft. or the R Journal that helps people learn how to use your software and exposes the methodology to a wider audience. Therefore we should know something about those journals. (I recently got a good reply on Reddit about the difference between these journals.)

The Geokook.

When I was considering submitting my paper on psd to J. Stat. Soft. (JSS), I kept noticing that the time from “Submitted” to “Accepted” was nearly two years in many cases.  I ultimately decided that was much too long of a review process, no matter what the impact factor might be (and in two years time, would I even care?).  Tonight I had the sudden urge to put together a dataset of times to publication.

Fortunately the JSS website is structured such that it only took a few minutes playing with XML scraping (*shudder*) to write the (R) code to reproduce the full dataset.  I then ran a changepoint (published in JSS!) analysis to see when shifts in mean time have occurred.  Here are the results:

Top: The number of days for a paper to go from ‘Submitted’ to ‘Accepted’ as a function of the cumulative issue index (each paper is an “issue”…

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