Veterinary Vertex
Veterinary Vertex is a weekly podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the clinical and research discoveries published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (JAVMA) and the American Journal of Veterinary Research (AJVR). Tune in to learn about cutting-edge veterinary research and gain in-depth insights you won’t find anywhere else. Come away with knowledge you can put to use in your own practice – along with a healthy dose of inspiration to remind you what you love about veterinary medicine.
Veterinary Vertex
Improving Veterinary Journal Publication Times
How long should it take to publish your veterinary research? What happens when a journal promises publication in just 40 days? And how have publication times changed across veterinary medicine in recent years?
Dr. Mark Rishniw joins Veterinary Vertex to discuss his eye-opening research on publication speeds across veterinary journals. Drawing from his analysis of submission-to-publication timelines spanning six years, he reveals how most clinical veterinary publications have dramatically improved their efficiency—with JAVMA transforming from taking two years to publish articles to less than 100 days from submission to publication with robust peer review.
The conversation takes a fascinating turn when Mark identifies a cluster of journals with publishing speeds that "defy belief." These publications process thousands of articles annually in just 40 days or less, raising serious questions about peer review quality. "How do they find qualified reviewers who will do a critical review that quickly?" Mark asks, noting that specialized journals struggle to find reviewers for just 100 articles per year.
Beyond the data, Mark offers practical advice for researchers navigating the publication landscape. He recommends writing introductions and methods while conducting research, consulting biostatisticians before collecting data, and—most importantly—choosing journals based on audience fit and reputation rather than speed alone. "Don't pick a journal just because it's really quick," he cautions, emphasizing that publication in questionable journals might compromise the credibility of one's work.
Whether you're a seasoned researcher or just beginning your publishing journey, this episode provides crucial insights into the evolving world of veterinary publishing. How will you choose where to publish your next breakthrough? Subscribe to Veterinary Vertex for more conversations that shape the future of veterinary medicine.
JAVMA article: https://doi.org/10.2460/javma.25.03.0151
INTERESTED IN SUBMITTING YOUR MANUSCRIPT TO JAVMA ® OR AJVR ® ?
JAVMA ® : https://avma.org/JAVMAAuthors
AJVR ® : https://avma.org/AJVRAuthors
FOLLOW US:
JAVMA ® :
Facebook: Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association - JAVMA | Facebook
Instagram: JAVMA (@avma_javma) • Instagram photos and videos
Twitter: JAVMA (@AVMAJAVMA) / Twitter
AJVR ® :
Facebook: American Journal of Veterinary Research - AJVR | Facebook
Instagram: AJVR (@ajvroa) • Instagram photos and videos
Twitter: AJVR (@AJVROA) / Twitter
JAVMA ® and AJVR ® LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/avma-journals
From the makers of vet-recommended Greenies Dental Treats comes an easy way to support your dog's wellness. Greenies Smart Essentials dry food delivers complete, balanced nutrition with science-backed recipes. Greenies Supplements, developed by a team of PhD animal nutritionists, offers options to help support healthy joints, digestion and more, Whether it's mealtime or mobility support. Greenies helps you care for your dog from the inside out. Learn more at Greeniescom.
Speaker 2:This is Veterinary Vertex, a podcast of the AVMA Journals. In this episode, we discuss how most but not all clinical veterinary journals have improved publication speed of research articles, with our guest, mark Vishnu.
Speaker 3:Welcome listeners. I'm Editor-in-Chief Lisa Fortier, and I'm joined by Sarah Wright, mark, my friend and colleague of Cornell for 30 plus years. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy biking and working schedule to be with us here today.
Speaker 4:Thank you. It's a pleasure, Lisa and Sarah.
Speaker 2:All right, let's dive right in. So, mark, your Javma article discusses how most clinical veterinary journals improve process time over the last six years. Please share with our listeners the background on this article.
Speaker 4:Yeah, with pleasure. So about six or seven years ago a friend, a colleague of mine, pete White, who's a retired emeritus professor at Cornell, and I started to look into the publication speeds of journals and it was prompted, somewhat facetiously, by the observation that Javma would take about two years from the time you submitted till the time the article appeared in print. The time the article appeared in print to the point where we used to think that the little cross superscript next to somebody's name meant that they were posthumous authors because they died waiting for their article to appear. But turns out that wasn't quite the case, but not far off it. So we looked at who's doing what and how well are they doing it? Are there journals that seem to be on top of the game? Are there not?
Speaker 4:It had been done in medicine, in the medical and scientific, other basic scientific literature a little bit, and there was a website that we found, or that I found that, where somebody had plotted this over the decades, looking at publication speeds. And so we thought, well, let's look at veterinary journals and just see how they rank against others. So that was the impetus for the first paper and actually never got published. But then, through some email correspondence with another colleague more recently. It led me to say, well, I can repeat this to see if that claim of that colleague was true or not, that they claimed that they were, on average, on par with every other veterinary journal. And I thought, well, we've got the data we can compare and we can look to see if journals have improved, worsened, stayed the same, what's happened, and give people another, you know another benchmark of journal, of clinical journals.
Speaker 2:Yeah, super interesting, mark. We were talking a little bit about my career path before we jumped on to this podcast episode and how it came from a clinical Zucorian background to this role in scholarly publishing and even as a student I remember thinking like knowing it was long publication times, not somewhere you really want to submit. So it's been a real pleasure to work with Lisa to really turn things around and advance veterinary medicine to and share and better communicate authors' findings as well communicate authors' findings as well.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and it was our observation that JABMA had done a really good job in the last two years of dramatically improving publication speeds. The original work generally suggested that review times are immutable. It takes about six months from the time you first submit to the time it gets accepted give or take a month or two, but generally somewhere in that range for that first part of a processing, and that you couldn't change that. And then the rest of it was the processing time that the journal takes then to publish the article once it's been submitted and accepted. And again with the improvements in publication and online getting manuscripts online, jabmab was stalled for quite a while in an old model that was no longer really applicable, and so I think that was what we found mostly, although surprisingly, it was actually the review time also that dramatically improved with certain journals.
Speaker 2:There are less than 100 days submission and publication now consistently, which is awesome.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean it's amazing when most of the journals we've looked at are closer to, I would say, eight to nine months. So it's not bad, but it's not brilliant.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and sometimes I think it's really important to keep pointing out that we have a robust peer review as well. Right when I used to go and say, ooh, this is our time to publication, people were like, yeah, that might not want to be your biggest bragging point right now, like we're author-friendly, reviewer-friendly and lots of other things. Actually, that article that Mark was talking about was one of the pieces of information I brought forth in my interview to the AVMA for the job and I was like here's the evidence on how far behind JAVMA and AJVR are.
Speaker 4:Yeah, there was one other journal, the Journal of Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care, which was on par with JAVMA of the past, which was on par with Jabma of the past and, somewhat disappointingly, even though we alerted the editor-in-chief of that seven years ago, no changes have substantially happened with that journal. And Pete White and I used to joke that for a journal concerned with emergency and critical care, it's clearly not an emergency to publish any information to people. So yeah, emergency and critical care, it's clearly not an emergency to publish any information to people. So yeah it's. And and I'm not, we're not um embarrassed to ashay to shame some of these editors into trying to improve their game. If it works, everybody benefits and I've got no, you know, horse in the race other than just to see people, especially authors, get stuff out in a timely fashion, especially if you're trying to credential too.
Speaker 2:I know that was something I was always looking. Especially authors get stuff out in a timely fashion. Especially if you're trying to credential too I know that was something I was always looking for when I was trying to publish is what's going to be fast and good and constructive so I can get this in time for residency et cetera.
Speaker 4:Absolutely, and the number of downloads we've had and the number of views of our paper is both the first one and the second one. And the first one we basically advertised it through listservs. It was published into a repository. It was never published formally because the journals we approached said oh, this is not interesting enough. Suggests that people care about this. They actually are interested in finding journals that are responsive but critical.
Speaker 2:So what are some of the important take-home messages from this article?
Speaker 4:The things that we noticed is that, as I say, mostly the review time has not changed for most journals. Some got a little better, some got a little worse. I think there were two journals that actually had longer review times than they did seven years ago, which is somewhat surprising. The processing speeds improved considerably because people now can get articles up and oftentimes in a journal they'll have an article up within a month of accepting, which is pretty reasonable speed, and some of them are up within a day. That's pretty outstanding. Some within a week, but generally within a month or so. You can see your article once it's been accepted, but generally within a month or so you can see your article once it's been accepted.
Speaker 4:The other big thing that we noticed was that there were a small group of journals that have emerged in the interim period that appear to have publication speeds that defy belief in terms of. They are outliers from the rest of the field, and for a number of reasons. One, they routinely have submission to publication times of less than 40 days is what our median was, but oftentimes less than a month and they publish an order of magnitude more articles per year than virtually any other journal, and they actually we figured out that they publish more articles than virtually all of the other journals combined that we looked at. So the question then becomes how do they find sufficient reviewers, assuming that their rejection rates are similar to other journals and they're equally critical of the submissions that they receive? How do they find qualified reviewers who will do a critical review that quickly?
Speaker 4:And I don't know we're not speculating. Everybody could do with if we knew how you were managing to get between 8,000 and 12,000 reviewers a year. That's incredible. I'm a veterinary cardiologist by training and the Journal of Veterinary Cardiology published, I think, less than 100 papers last year, and they claim that they struggle to find reviewers for that journal for just 100 papers. So when you're publishing 3,000 or 4,000 papers a year, how are you finding competent reviewers to do a good job for you when these small journals strut it? And that was the other big take home. It led to us thinking well, maybe there should be some cautionary advice for authors looking for a quick publication is are you really publishing in a journal that is reputable or are you going to be suffering later on because, yeah, it came out quickly but nobody believes it? Or everybody thinks, well, it just got published in such and such a journal.
Speaker 3:Yeah, oh, really good points. You know, like finding reviewers is the hardest part, whether you're Nature or Javma or any journal. We've done a ton within the submission platform to automate things like send your reminder, send your reminder, move on to the next. And that takes time. It takes a lot of time to get that submission platform up and running. Yeah, really good words of caution for some of the authors that maybe don't know any better.
Speaker 4:And I feel for some of the editors and the scientific editors and the editors-in-chief of some of the smaller journals, because oftentimes it's a part-time job for them. So they're working a full-time academic career and on top of this they're going home and dealing with three or four hours of manuscripts every night, if they can, and having a family and trying to have a life, and it becomes difficult. I appreciate that. So Jabma, I think, has a very coveted position of having full-time editorial staff and a reasonable number of editorial staff that allow you to do this as a, you know, as a career rather than just as a sideline.
Speaker 3:Yeah, very true, and as a result of your article, other editors have reached out to me and I have the same philosophy that you do. We're all on the same team for the pets. I'm happy to share any tips and tricks. I just recently shared our revision letter that, as you know, has exact examples on how to write a revision in your manuscript, and they're like ooh, thank you for that. I'm happy to share any of that stuff too. We share the same philosophy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You touched a little bit earlier on the first article and publication speed and then the second one. Was it just like hanging around noodling with Professor Emeritus White that came up with that idea, or how did that idea spark in your mind in the first place?
Speaker 4:I think it was because of something that we tried to submit back in the day to JABMA and how long it was taking to come out. Um, and so it just becomes a bee in my bonnet and I start to, you know, like a terrier going down a rabbit hole, and I'm just not going to give up. And so I thought, well, let's, let's just see how other journals do. And it was just a, you know, just curiosity. So this one was then again sparked by a second journal where I was struggling, where we had a paper that seemed a fairly straightforward manuscript and it took over a year to go through review with four rounds of revisions.
Speaker 4:It seemed like either the reviewers were stalling us for some sort of political gain or the editors were just being bogged down and unable to make it an editorial decision that this is enough. It's. Either we're going to you know excuse it the french, and I'm not going to say it um, uh, you know or get off the pot, and we'd be happy to cut our losses if that was what it was. But it just kept us dragging out and each revision took three months to come back when it was like, okay, we've addressed these changes. Why? Why can't the reviewer see this in three days, say yes, no, done and move on. So yeah, that was the frustration. It's all borne out by frustration.
Speaker 3:Well, there's no shortage of curiosity in Mark Rishnu. We know that too. You already described some of the really cool findings, but anytime we do a study, something's like wow, I didn't expect that. What surprised you from looking at the data in this article?
Speaker 4:I think it was the small group of the super fast journals. Partly I sort of expected, because I'd already published several papers since Lisa had taken over with Javma, so I knew that Javma had improved dramatically. So part of it was also a highlight and I also felt that if I can make Javma look good she's going to accept the paper. So there was a selfish interest there, Maybe, there, Maybe. But yeah. So those were the big things. And then you know, the expectants were that online speed getting from acceptance to online publication is pretty consistent now and should have improved the overall time, and it seems to have done that for most journals.
Speaker 2:So, mark, is there anything else in the future? Future Hopper, so any other like next steps, future research in this topic?
Speaker 4:Not on this particular topic at the moment. Um, I, you know I've always got stuff in the Hopper, but, um, you know, I've got, I think, nine papers published this year so far. So, um, yeah, there's always stuff going on this one, uh, we'll, we'll let it rest for a bit, um, and then maybe come back to it. Um, you know, I'm getting to the point where I like looking at things that are somewhat philosophical, um, but, uh, so, you know, uh, yeah, it's hard to say, but nothing, nothing in the in this line, I'll you know. Uh, yeah, it's hard to say, but nothing, nothing in the in this line, I'll you know.
Speaker 4:People have asked me can you do other journals, can you do our journal? And I'm like, well, you could do it. Um, the methods are pretty easy. It just requires a lot of grunt work and a lot of clicking, open and closing web pages that have got all the stats there, you know, because you can't download them, as far as I know, in a simple, easily extractable format. So I simply went through, page after page, journal after journal, and just noted, copied and pasted their you know submission date, their acceptance date and their first online date, and then collated it all and sorted it and then started drawing graphs.
Speaker 2:There is a similar process with looking at altmetrics, so online attention scores and dimensions, which tracks citation scores too for several veterinary journals. And, yeah, familiar with the process of writing everything down, but it makes team to help me, so, yes, so do you see a role for AI in this area of research?
Speaker 4:Honestly, I haven't thought about AI. I mean, it's something that if those data are easily extractable, then AI would make it even easier to do that. If you could set up right code to go and, just, you know, pull data from websites, essentially scraping them, that would certainly be something that could be largely automated and then maintained and updated, you know, essentially at a click of a button. I know nothing about you know, doing that sort of thing. Um, I have no real coding background, so, um, yeah, but it seems like it's. There's not a lot of interpretive or analytical complexity to what I did.
Speaker 4:Part of it's also just looking at the data and saying, oh, what does it show us? Which you know. I teach students and residents on how to look at data and biostatistics and the first thing I tell them is you know, draw a graph and look at it, because something's going to jump out at you or something you didn't expect will jump out at you. Or you'll think of something else, or you'll go. Why is that value a hundredfold bigger than every other one? Oh, somebody misplaced the decimal point.
Speaker 2:Very good advice. And for those of you just joining us, we're discussing how most, but not all, clinical veterinary journals have improved publication speed of research articles.
Speaker 3:with our guest Mark, hey, mark, you just said which is amazing nine articles already this year. You know how to get it done. What advice do you have for people? Take a breath, look at the data. What advice do you have for people on getting across the finish line?
Speaker 4:Especially for young authors, I would say, by the time you've started your experiment, you could probably or your research study, you could probably have the introduction and the methods written up. You should have probably figured out what results you want to definitely include. So you're not going to preclude the idea that, oh, we found something really interesting. But how are you going to display your results that you've gone in looking for, so that all you have to really do is write the results, write a brief discussion and, you know, put your references in, but and don't leave it till, you know, three months before you're set to graduate from your residency.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's always good to get started early. Like methods should be done, right yeah.
Speaker 4:I mean, while you're doing the experiment, you know what you're doing. It's the freshest in your mind about what you've just done or what you're going to do, and you can always tweak it. But you shouldn't be able to write it all out, because it's almost part of your proposal, right? So if you're getting funding for it, they want to know how you're going to do stuff and you can set all that out before you even start the experiment, for sure.
Speaker 2:Lisa and I were literally just talking about this because we're submitting a protocol for IRB review and I was like, hey, look at that, I got the introduction methods basically done from this protocol.
Speaker 4:And also, you know, to me the other thing is, if it's going to involve statistical analyses, meet with a biostatistician, preferably somebody who has clinical experience and understands what you're trying to do, so that you don't end up presenting them with a whole bunch of data saying, here, can you fix this for me? And they have no idea why or what you did, and so having somebody help clarify your project and determine okay, so this is what you want to do, so these are how we're going to collect the data, this is how we're going to analyze the data, so that you're not trying to figure that all out after the fact and going, oh, I should have gotten that.
Speaker 4:And oh man, I should have measured this and I didn't know that that was important.
Speaker 3:So yep Need ahead of time, for sure.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 2:So Marcus next set of questions is going to be really important for our listeners. The first one is going to be from the author's perspective. So what is one piece of information authors should know when choosing a journal for their manuscript submissions?
Speaker 4:I would say pick a journal. That well, I can't. I couldn't say one thing. I'd say pick a journal that targets your audience most accurately. So find out who is your paper intended to get at. Is it the specialists in your field? Is it generalists? Is it the general public? Find a journal that will most likely reach that group. And secondly, pick a journal that you believe that you would like to appear in because you consider it reputable, for whatever reason. It could be high prestige, it could be, you know, it's got a long history of track record, it's you know, where your, your mentor, had published, you know in, or whatever. Don't pick it just because it's really quick or really slow, or you know I'm going to get an answer back and it's going to be a yes answer and all I need to do is pay him several thousand dollars and the other side of do is pay him several thousand dollars On the other side of the relationship.
Speaker 2:what's one thing that readers should know?
Speaker 4:Not all journals are created equal Drop mic.
Speaker 3:Be cautious of the three.
Speaker 4:The cluster of three, yeah, and I have heard anecdotes about at least one of them, and you know it's not worth repeating these because it is all anecdotal evidence, but I have reason to want to avoid publishing in them and I don't think we need to anymore. A word for you, the Javnisphere that there's enough other journals in which you can publish and not be concerned about the credibility of your work being challenged.
Speaker 3:I think that's a good point, Mark, and many of those other journals other than that cluster of three are journals of associations or colleges, and it's nice to support those as well, rather than the ones that are clearly for profit.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks again, Mark. I love hanging out with you and Pete when I can make it in to talk about philosophy and publishing and all these things. And just thanks again for all your work and all the other help that you provide at Jabma and AGVR.
Speaker 4:You're welcome. Thank you, Lisa. I'll mention, though, that Pete's philosophy You're welcome. Thank you, Lisa. I'll mention, though, that Pete's philosophy discussions are nothing like my four-year-old niece's philosophy question yesterday, which was in the car after picking her up from daycare. Uncle Mark is infinity a number, Because my friend Lucy says it's a number, but I don't think it's a number.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. What was your answer?
Speaker 4:I said it's both a number and not a number.
Speaker 3:Yes, sometimes with kids, just a one word yes, yeah, maybe. Well, thanks again, mark. As we wind down, we'd like to ask a little bit of a fun question. I can't wait to hear this answer what was the first concert you attended?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so I thought about this and I gave you an option of two. And the reason I thought about it is that I was up at my oldest nieces, so my four-year-old nieces one half of the family. I've got two nieces who are in their twenties now and one was graduating from UVM a couple of weekends ago and after going out for dinner after graduation, we drove. I was driving her back to her uh apartment or the house that she stays in, um, and a song came on the radio which was um David Bowie's, uh something or other from his uh serious moonlight tour, which happened in 1983. And I said to Layla oh, I went to that concert, that was my first concert I ever went to, and then I realized that's 40 years ago, that's awesome.
Speaker 4:She sort of looked at me and go who's that guy on the radio? But whatever, Huey.
Speaker 3:Lewis and the News in 90. Oh, that was, it was the eighties. It was the early eighties, yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, huey Lewis would have been early to mid eighties.
Speaker 3:It was the early eighties.
Speaker 4:Yeah, huey Lewis would have been early to mid eighties. Absolutely yeah, and I remember the concert well because we were. It was at VFL park, which was a big football stadium in Melbourne, and we'd lined up overnight outside the gate for general admission. We'd already had the tickets but there was no seating assignment, so you just ran in and found your place as soon as they opened the gates. So first, in first serve yeah.
Speaker 2:I think I'd actually prefer that over the great Ticketmaster battle nowadays waking up at 6 am to get concert tickets, yeah.
Speaker 4:There was a lot of beer drunk that night waiting in, you know, in sleeping bags.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much, mark. We appreciate you being here and again for all that you do for our journals. So, thank you, no, mark, we appreciate you being here and again for all that you do for our journals.
Speaker 4:So thank you, no, thank you guys for inviting me. It's been fun.
Speaker 2:And to our listeners. You can read Mark's article on Javma. I'm Sarah Wright with Lisa Fortier. Be on the lookout for next week's episode and don't forget to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen to.
