I am interested to know if there is any list that indicates the Acceptance Rate (i.e. Total # of submitted manuscripts / total # of accepted manuscripts) of the Statistical Journals? By Statistical Journals I mean the journals like the ones listed here.

Note: I am well aware of the IF (impact factor) of a given journal but I am interested in the Acceptance Rate.


Well, you can usually obtain these statistics in the annual reports, which are available if you have a subscription to elsevier or otherwise. For statistics per se, it is difficult to find a comprised table, as it is usually applied in a interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary context.

However, you fill easily find lists (google) on other disciplines that will encompass statistical journals. For example, in economic journal reviews, you will always find a sub section on econometrics and statistics journals.

I found, however, a summary of annual reports where you can obtain a lot of data on actual rejection rates for most statistical journals (2010) [here], yet not "exactly" neatly organized in a table.

However, a word of (kindly advised) warning. Rejection rates are essentially meaningless imho. You will find 4 star journals with 5% acceptance rate, but also as high as 30%. Note, that some high impact journals ask for more than 200 dollars submission fee + revision fee extra (if it gets to that stage), so that only "confident" researchers consider to submit in the first place. Other journals in the same league are essentially for free which attracts a lot of first timers and thus increases the rejection rate. This totally skews the sample. Moreover, some authors are in high impact journals were accepted by invitation, which biases further the results.

Good luck!

  • $\begingroup$ note: rejection rate is of course 1-acceptance rate. So high international caliber journals sometimes accept only 5 out of 100 submissions. $\endgroup$ – Majte Mar 24 '13 at 20:17
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    $\begingroup$ Another factor that's important, but which might be hard to track down is the speed of rejection. Some big journals have enormous rejection rates - The British Medical Journal, for example, rejects something like 90% of papers without review - but it does it within a day or two, so there's little cost. If the journal takes 6 months to reject your paper, even if they rejection rate is only (!) 50%, it's still a bigger cost. $\endgroup$ – Jeremy Miles Apr 30 '13 at 16:29
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    $\begingroup$ @JeremyMiles: Totally agree on that. Especially as a PhD student, long periods (5-6 months+) of review waiting time are disastrous. I am totally against rapid-fire submissions (and actually that's the editor's work to stop) but when on the other hand when you end up with something like a 10-month+ period for submission-corrections-review_of_changes-acceptance you really get demotivated. $\endgroup$ – usεr11852 May 1 '13 at 0:37

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