Median publication delays at 38 APA journals

Last week, I had a paper accepted at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  This acceptance is good for me, as JPSP is one of the more prestigious journals in my field.  However, given how grueling the review process has been, it's hard for me to feel happy about this acceptance -- based on my records, this paper spent about 17 months in review, and right now it has only been accepted, not published.

Of course, I am far from the only person whose paper has spent a long time in the limbo between acceptance and publication.  In fact, based on two analyses of papers in PubMed, this experience seems distressingly common.  For example, Steve Royle found that papers submitted to cell biology journals in 2013 and indexed by PubMed take about 100 days to go from received to accepted and another 120 days to go from accepted to published, for a total of 220 days.  In another analysis, Daniel Himmelstein analyzed the time between acceptance and publication for 3,476 journals indexed by PubMed in 2014.  I didn't see an overall median lag time, but most of the lags seem to be between 50 and 60 days.

Both of these analyses focus primarily on biology journals, and primarily on journals indexed by PubMed.  For example, if you try search for "J Pers Soc Psychol", the PubMed abbreviation for JPSP, on the Himmelstein site, you will not find this journal listed -- possibly because JPSP does not report the receipt and acceptance dates for each article in PubMed.  This leads me to my question: Do the Royle and Himmelstein analyses reflect the typical delays at psychology journals?

Mapping "prejudice" research reveals its preoccupation with implicit bias

One of the many difficulties of doing social science is that the concepts that we study are often fuzzy.  Precisely defining concepts like "attitudes", "cognition", and the "self" can be challenging, which sometimes leads to dramatic differences in how scientists use the terms.

The challenges are only enhanced when the object of study is a politically charged concept like my chosen field of study, prejudice.  I believe this fuzziness in the definition of "prejudice" has exerted a distorting influence on research on the topic, affecting the questions researchers ask, the measures researchers use, and the interventions researchers develop.

Today, I'm going to focus on a small piece of this issue by answering the following questions:

1. When contemporary researchers choose to study "prejudice", how do they use the term?
2. What does contemporary researchers' use of the term "prejudice" reveal about their (often unstated) definitions of of the term?