Are acceptance and publication times longer in primary health care journals compared to internal medicine journals? A comparative study of 117 high-impact journals

Speed of publication can be used as an indicator for estimating the publication efficiency of journals. We aimed to assess whether median acceptance, publication and total times differed for articles published in internal medicine (IM) journals and those published in primary health care (PHC) journals. We extracted all articles published in 2012–2022 in all IM or PHC journals with an impact factor greater than two (N = 117 journals). We calculated for each article the acceptance time (= number of days from submission to acceptance), the publication time (= number of days from acceptance to publication), and the total time (= number of days from submission to publication). We compared median acceptation/publication/total times for IM and PHC journals using Wilcoxon rank-sum tests. There were 68,612 articles for determining acceptance times, 70,158 for publication times, and 69,831 for total times. Median submission/acceptance/total times were 41/50/89 days longer in PHC vs. IM journals (p-values < 0.001). In conclusion, we found that median acceptance/publication/total times were higher in PHC vs. IM journals. This study shows that there is room for improvement in the speed of publication of articles in PHC journals.