Time lag in journal publication
Just a short thought or should I say a long thought in a short form or should I say a short thought in a short form or should I stop this and just say!
A recent correspondence with a colleague pointed out the 2 to 3 year lag from submission to publication of an article in a very good MAA journal. This is not an unusual time lag actually. And that is the point of this short thought in a short form . . . stop that . . . .
This publication lag is really tough on authors. That is one reason PRIMUS (a journal I founded and now offered to MAA members, yeah!) went from 4 issues/year to 10 issues/year - to keep things moving along. However, then THAT fills up and the lag continues.
Gotta be a mathematical model or sequence in there somewhere. . . . journal goes to n issue/year and the delay in publishing is a function of n, hopefully a decreasing function with f(n) --> 0 as n goes to infinity, of course. But what would f(n) look like. Perhaps because of the D word in SIMIODE we could more easily ask what would f'(n) look like or f(n+1) - f(n) at the very least?
As I said, "Just a short thought or should I say a long thought in a short form or should I say a short thought in a short form or should I stop this and just just say!" Enough said.