Journal acceptance times from PubMed history dates, 2026 edition

Median time from submission to acceptance for research articles in 108 journals, measured from the received and accepted dates that publishers deposit in PubMed. Metric: Submission to acceptance (median days), research articles published in 2024-2025, measured from PubMed history dates; includes author revision time; not time to first decision; not an acceptance rate. Across 108 journals, the typical journal took a median of 147 days from submission to acceptance for research articles published in 2024-2025; half of the journals had medians between 98 and 215 days. Method (v2): Research articles only (PubMed publication type Journal Article; letters, comments, editorials, reviews, case reports, errata and similar types excluded), up to 300 per journal sampled at random within each publication month of 2024-2025. Intervals come from the received and accepted dates publishers deposit in PubMed. A journal is published only when PubMed covers at least 80% of its Crossref-registered articles, at least 60% of sampled articles carry both dates, and at least 30 articles are measured. Rows whose received date appears to be a revision date, or that differ by more than 25% from a publisher-reported figure for the same interval, are held for review. Twenty randomly chosen journals were recomputed from raw PubMed records with independently written code; all 20 matched. Counts: 284 journals checked; 108 published, 8 held for review (6 with a possible revision-date received date, 2 beyond 25% of a publisher-reported figure) and 168 suppressed by the gates. Independent validation: 20/20 journals recomputed from raw PubMed records matched exactly. Ten-year comparison: the same method applied to publication dates from 2014-01-01 to 2015-12-31. Across 60 journals measurable in both periods, the median journal took 17% longer to accept a research paper in 2024-2025 than in 2014-2015, though the 95% interval (0% to 34%) reaches no change, so the overall shift is modest. 37 got slower and 20 got faster. The split by publisher is sharper: all 10 Cell Press journals got slower (median +48%), while all 5 MDPI journals got faster (median -37%). Pairs whose yearly series shows a one-year level shift, or whose median moved more than 2.5 times, are held and marked. The older window was checked against Daniel Himmelstein's open PubMed delays data (https://github.com/dhimmel/delays). The window is publication dates from 2024-01-01 to 2025-12-31. Only accepted articles are measured, so the figures describe papers that were accepted; they are not a ranking of journals and do not predict an individual manuscript's time. Publisher-reported comparison figures are not redistributed. Files: the dataset as CSV (with a commented header carrying the metric, method, licence, citation and codebook) and JSON, the ten-year comparison as CSV and JSON, a codebook, README, licence, CITATION.cff and SHA-256 checksums. At release, the data files are byte-identical to the downloads on the dataset home and on the canonical page. Canonical page: https://manusights.com/review-timelinesDataset home (method, codebook, changelog): https://manusights.com/resources/journal-intelligence