Journal Acceptance Times 2026: Data From 3,000+ Journals

The typical journal takes about four months to accept a paper. Across 3,062 PubMed-indexed journals, the median journal took 115 days from submission to acceptance for journal articles published in 2024 and 2025. A quarter of journals took under 88 days and a quarter took over 152. Field matters more than prestige: Chemistry journals had the shortest median (82 days) and Psychology journals the longest (169.5 days), while Q1 and Q4 journals differed by only 9 days.

Do higher-ranked journals take longer to accept?

Only slightly. We grouped each journal by its best OpenAlex subfield quartile. Q1 journals are a little slower at the median, but the spread inside every quartile is far wider than the gap between them, so a journal's quartile tells you little about how long it will take.

Acceptance time by field

Fields with at least 40 qualifying journals, using each journal's main OpenAlex field. Psychology and the health professions are the slowest; chemistry and engineering journals are among the fastest.

How long do the largest journals take?

The highest-volume journals with enough public dates, from fastest to slowest median. Several large open access journals accept in about a month, while selective flagships take six months or more.

Look up any other journal on its journal page, which shows its median and the range covering the middle half of its articles.

Method

• Source: PubMed E-utilities. For each journal we requested up to 100 journal articles published between 2024-01-01 and 2025-12-31, matched by the journal's ISSNs.
• Measure: days between the received and accepted dates that publishers deposit in PubMed. Revision time is included because the clock runs from first submission to final acceptance.
• Inclusion: a journal counts only when enough of its sampled articles carry both dates (3,062 of 10,858 journals screened, 281,603 articles in total).
• Summary:we take each journal's median, then report the distribution of those medians, so large journals do not dominate the result.
• Limits: journals that do not deposit history dates are missing, which leaves out some large publishers. Received dates can reflect a resubmission rather than the first submission, and acceptance is not publication: production adds weeks to months. Quartiles and fields come from the Journal Metrics Score release built on OpenAlex data.

For what happens at each stage between submission and publication, see How long does it take to publish a paper?