The high cost of re-formatting papers for submission to journals

One of the worst tasks in research is formatting papers ready for submission to an academic journal. Every journal has its own idiosyncratic requirements, in terms of formatting, referencing, word limits, abstract length, keywords, and so on. None of the time spent on formatting is productive time, and most of it is time wasted, given that more than half of the time your article submission is going to be rejected (and will need to be formatted again for submission to the next journal).

How much time is wasted on the task of re-formatting? This 2019 paper by Yan Jiang (Stanford University) and co-authors collected data from authors of articles in:

twelve journals from the InCites Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database in each of eight broad scientific (biology, biochemistry and molecular biology, microbiology, immunology, and cell biology) and clinical fields (cardiology, gastroenterology, oncology).

In total, they had 206 responses (out of the 288 authors they approached). They found that:

When asked how much time was needed for reformatting to all journals to which the paper was resubmitted to, the majority of authors (77/118, 65%...) reported that they spent 1–3 days or more (one day of effort was defined to the respondent as meaning eight hours). This did not include time spent on improving the scientific content or waiting for reviewer comments. Time spent on reformatting alone delayed resubmissions by over two weeks in most instances (60/118, 51%...).

I'd suggest that 1-3 days on re-formatting is probably an overestimate, based on my experience. One day perhaps, but only if the journal you are submitting to is incredibly idiosyncratic in terms of referencing (e.g. there are some journals that require the first names of authors in the reference list, and that take forever to compile). Anyway, based on the survey responses, Jiang et al. estimate the total cost of time spent on re-formatting:

Based on our data of 57.3% of articles needing resubmission, the time spent on reformatting... and prior data of 2.3 million annual scientific articles published... we estimate that first or corresponding authors spend about 23.8 million hours reformatting worldwide every year. Using the average first year postdoctoral researcher salary of $48,432... we roughly estimate costs of reformatting to be around $550 million dollars yearly worldwide for the first or corresponding author. When taking into account the time spent by the entire research team... the costs are estimated to be $1.1 billion dollars.

Yikes! The formatting requirements of journals cost US$1.1 billion per year. We need more journals to adopt a process where the authors can submit in any sensible format for the initial submission. Jiang et al. note how rare this is in their sample:

At the time of our review, only 4/96 (4%) of journals offered fully format-free initial submission.

Finally, I found this bit from the start of the introduction kind of quaint:

The process of publishing peer-reviewed research can be slow and onerous... It is not uncommon for manuscript reviews to take three months and the overall time from submission to publication to take between seven to nine months...

I think there would be plenty of economists who would dream of a process that takes seven to nine months from submission to publication, rather than periods up to several years at some top journals.

[HT: Marginal Revolution, back in 2019]