In their recent communication “Come all ye scientists, busy and exhausted. O come ye, O come ye, out of the lab”, Ladle and colleagues demonstrate that a growing number of scientists is submitting manuscripts on Christmas day. The increasing pressure to publish and the advent of online editorial systems have rendered scientific writing a 24-7 industry, and I agree that this may have contributed to the observed trend. Nevertheless, I believe there may be another reason involved in the rising number of Santa papers: the pleasure of having your work published with an exceptional submission date.
To demonstrate this, I searched for ‘Received 29 February [year]’ and ‘Received 1 March [year]’ and different format variations hereof, using Google Scholar, to find out how many manuscripts were received by academic journals on leap day (a widely accepted special day) and on the corresponding sixtieth day of the revised Julian calendar in normal years – the first of March – between 1980 and 2005. I found that more papers were submitted during the studied period on leap day than on the corresponding day of the next year. What’s more, also on the first of March in leap years, there were more submissions than on the subsequent regular first of March.
Figure 1 (on Flickr)
Number of published papers initially submitted on 29 February and 1 March, showing higher submission rates in leap years, except in the weekends (asterisks).
The trend was consistent, except in week-ends, which suggests that leap day submitters have a publishing niche, that some of them probably submit too late, but also that they prefer weekends over work (Figure 1). As notable dates widely vary between regions and cultures, I suspect many more, but maybe less obvious, submission peaks exist, along with more personal or accidental peaks related to birthdays or, for instance, Friday the Thirteenths. For one I plead guilty, having submitted this letter initially to the editor of Nature… on February 29.
Naturally, this letter was not retained for publication, which made me think again: where there is a submission peak, there must also be a rejection peak. The editors must be busy!
Fascinating! Maybe somebody will look at any correlation between all public holidays and manuscript submissions—but would journals log receipt on the holiday or the day after?
I’m quite chuffed as it turns out: my paper that was horribly delayed is finally in the 29th February edition of JMB.
Might it be that people have deadlines of “submit by the end of the month”?
To follow up Maxine’s question – that could be done, if someone is prepared to put the data together (i.e. the number of papers submitted on every day for the past n years, and whether that day was a holiday), I’d be happy to push it through the computer, and see what it looks like (looks like a job for a GAM).
One problem might be that different countries have different holidays, so it would help if submissions could be broken down by country. AND a lot of countries have holidays that are tied to the lunar calender, or a combination of lunar and solar calenders.
Yes indeed Bob, that was what I was thinking, but couldn’t get the job done on one day (had to submit on February 29 of course :)