Post #1720512
2026-04-08 03:23 UTC
Replies (3)
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@siderea@universeodon.com 2026-04-08 03:55
@Canageek Right? It's a pretty fascinating question. I have here an experimental research study from 1918 on the efficacy of face masks that was conducted in the earliest weeks of the Spanish Flu outbreak in the US, which started August 27th or 28th. How much trouble they were in only really started dawning on the military around Sept 7th; the article was by two Army scientists. The publication date on the article is the 12th of October. Its findings (6 ft is not enough for a safe zone for unmasked speakers) makes the Boston Globe on October the 14th, though uncited. It is possible, I suppose, that these researchers were felicitously already working on the problem when the Spanish Flu rolled over the US, but the opening words are, "The use of face masks by those whose duties necessitate their coming in contact with cases of respiratory infection has now become general" suggesting at least the writing up happened after the pandemic started. So at the very least they wrote up the experiments, if not conducted them entire, and submitted the manuscript to JAMA, and the journal managed to publish it, necessarily in hard copy, and distribute it wherever it wound up, in approximately ONE CALENDAR MONTH.
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@SRLevine@neuromatch.social 2026-04-08 04:07
@Canageek @siderea I think if it was peer reviewed you'd have to add in time for both mailing copies to reviewers and for the reviewers to mail them back to the editor and if necessary (ie: needs revision) back to the authors. I'd put a week for each of those things on the conservative side. I've seen papers with both "submitted" and "accepted" dates, including older ones, I can maybe poke around tomorrow. But there is also taking into account publication timelines, old journals are printed more like magazines than news papers, which take longer to print so there is a longer lead time before publication (and if every article slot in a particular issue was already full a paper would be bumped to the next issue even if there was time to include it in the print run).
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@Canageek@wandering.shop 2026-04-08 04:14
@siderea The lead time on the issue is why I was trying to get to with typesetting, as I understand it small print runs like a journal issue don't take very long (see newspapers) but getting it all typed up and edited and ready to go to the printers might take a while. On the other hand, newspapers used to do it multiple times *per day*