Background
This study aimed to calculate the time lapse between the submission of a manuscript to a journal and its acceptance, and to ascertain the factors that influence this duration.
Most graduate schools require doctoral candidates to publish articles in peer-reviewed academic journals before the Ph. D is conferred on them. In addition, it is useful for scholars to know how long it takes to publish a paper because they must evince a number of published papers to successfully search for a job and to build a career in academia.
Methods
In total, four publications were selected for this study. The Japanese Journal of Educational Psychology, Cognitive Studies, and the Japanese Journal of Personality recorded the highest Impact Factors (IFs) among Japanese psychological journals in 2010 (Kato et al., 2015). Psychological bulletin registered the second highest global IF in its domain in 2010 (Scimago, 2018). The data for the investigation included the dates of receipt and acceptance of original manuscripts in the above journals between 2008 and 2017. The annual aggregate of original articles published during the same period was also computed.
Findings
Japanese journals averaged 350 days (n = 503, SD = 191) and the Psychological Bulletin took 366 days (n = 396, SD = 170) on average from the date of receipt to the date of acceptance in the decade for which the data were studied. There was no significant difference between the Japanese journals and the international publication. The combined data for all four journals were used to correlate the annual average time lapse with the number of papers published in that year (r = .524, p = .0005).
Discussion
Researchers must wait a year for their papers to be published in the selected journals. The results of this investigation did not conform to Sakamoto’s assertion (2013) that English Journal articles tend to be reviewed faster than Japanese.
This investigation did not consider acceptance rates. Further studies should scrutinize the acceptance rates, collect data over a larger span of time, and explore other psychological journals.

How many days do researchers have to wait for their papers to be published?