Is statistician involvement as co-author associated with reduced time to publication of quantitative research in general medical journals? A bibliometric study.

Objective: We aimed to compare the number of submissions until acceptance and the time to publication between articles co-authored and articles not co-authored by statisticians.

Methods: We randomly selected 781 articles published in 2016 in 18 high impact factor journals of general internal medicine and primary care. For each article, we retrieved its date of submission to the journal and its first publication; we also contacted its corresponding author and asked about the number of submissions necessary from the first submission to a journal until acceptance and whether the article was co-authored by a statistician. After having excluded qualitative studies, we compared the articles co-authored with those not co-authored by statisticians in terms of number of submissions and submission-to-publication time, using negative binomial and Cox regressions, adjusted for intracluster correlations.

Results: One hundred fifty-eight authors completed the questionnaire (20%); 136 articles with quantitative design were included in the study. Overall, 63 articles (46%) were co-authored by statisticians. There was no statistically significant difference in the number of submissions (statistician group: mean 2.1 (SD 1.1) versus 2.2 (SD 1.2), P value 0.87). By contrast, we found a statistically significant difference in the submission-to-publication time (statistician group: median 211 days [interquartile range (IQR) 171] versus 260 (IQR 144); hazard ratio 1.44 (95% CI 1.01-2.03), adjusted P value 0.04).

Conclusions: Papers co-authored by statisticians have a shorter time to publication. We encourage researchers to closely involve statisticians in the design, conduct and statistical analysis of research, not only to ensure high standards of quality but also to speed up its publication.