How Long Does PLoS Take to Review a Paper? All PLoS Journals Now

Due to popular demand (at least two people asked, surely that’s demand), here is a generalization of Monday’s work to include a few more PLoS journals. (This was mostly because it was easier to generalize my scripts to process process any PLoS journal.)

Here are the images for all PLoS journals. PLoS 1 at the end is the same figure I posted on Monday.

PLoS Pathogens:


PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases:


PLoS Medicine:


PLoS Genetics:


PLoS CompBio:


PLoS Biology:


PLoS One:


For PLoS journals, except PLoS Medicine, it seems that the average acceptance time is 5 months. PLoS Medicine takes 7 months.

PLoS Medicine is the journal that takes the longest to review, PLoS One is the fastest (although some of the papers may have been reviewed in another PLoS journal before, speeding up the process).


Script are on github.

How Long Does Plos One Take to Accept A Paper?

How long do papers take to review?

Too long.




Histogram of acceptance times










The code for the above is available on github.

UpdateFollowup with all PLoS Journals.