I have an article forthcoming in *academic journal*. I sent the final version early 2010, and it has been put online for early view on September 6 of that year. It still hasn’t been included in an issue (1082 days later), and the journal currently has 141 articles in earlyview awaiting to be included in an issue. At the moment, the oldest was put there in July 2009, or 1495 days ago. This may be suited for astrology journals, where you can write about what’s going to happen in the future for timely publication, but not really for the social sciences.
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Alexandre Afonso 
2 responses to “The Purgatory of Academic Articles”
You usually publish very interesting pieces, but this one doesn’t go very far. This is just personal anger and frustration made public.
Now, I don’t mean that the subject itself is not interesting. There ‘d be a lot to say about academic journals (ridiculously high prices, incompetence, useless paper usage in 2013, etc.) and an investigation piece would eb very interesting… but this is pointless rant is.
I accept the “rant” criticism. As you say, there is surely a more thorough piece to write about this. What I refer to is also a result of the “publish or perish” culture that is pervading academic departments, especially in the UK with the Research Excellence Framework. Academics are prompted to publish lots of articles not really to produce new knowledge, but to satisfy bureaucratic criteria linked to tenure and funding, and there have been a bunch of new journals emerging in recent years just to satisfy this tendency. On the more mundane question of journal backlogs, journals should be either more selective in their review process, or get rid of the idea of issues altogether. I may come back to this with a more elaborate piece.