Post #989124

2026-04-08 01:25 UTC

Weird anthropology of science question du jour: If there's a research journal article published in the Jan 1969 issue of the journal, what is the plausibly latest possible date the manuscript was submitted to the journal? It was a toxicology mouse study published in a pharmacology journal, in the US, if it matters. I'm not interested in how long it would take to go from manuscript submission to publication *today*, I am specifically interested in this historical point in time. And I know there can be effectively endless rounds of revisions requested, I'm trying to get a last plausible date the manuscript might have been submitted, allowing for whatever uncompressible timeline there would have been in the 1960s for preparing and publishing a hardcopy academic journal. So assume it had the shortest possible reasonable timeline for approval.

Replies (3)

@Canageek@wandering.shop 2026-04-08 03:23

@siderea If you get a reliable answer to this, I'd love to know. I expect it would only be marginally longer than today, because I really don't think mailing the manuscript in is versus digital uploading is going to add more than a day or two. On the other hand typesetting it might take considerably longer, I don't have a sense for how long that would take in the 60s.

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@AlexxKay@kind.social 2026-04-08 04:09

@siderea I wish my dad was alive to ask. While he didn't become an editor until a few years later, he might have had useful insight.

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@0xKaishakunin@mastodon.social 2026-04-09 13:22

@siderea I found https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01624799#citeas from the Österreichische Botanische Zeitschrift in 1970 (nowadays known as Plant Systematics and Evolution) Received: 03 May 1973 Issue date: June 1973 So 2 months max seems reasonable. There is also https://www.jstor.org/stable/43339321 which was received on 16.12.1969 and published in Vol. 118, No. 1/2 (1970), which sadly has no date in our library catalogue

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