Scientific careers often hinge on publication timelines, as hiring, funding, and promotion decisions depend on when research enters the scholarly record. That process relies heavily on peer review, where editors assess manuscripts, referees evaluate them, and authors revise them before acceptance. Because each stage shapes how quickly findings become citable work, review timing is a measurable component of academic progression. A recent large-scale analysis published in PLOS Biology, however, suggests that those timelines may not unfold equally, revealing gender-linked differences across biomedical and life science publications.1
A team at the University of Nevada, Reno found that biomedical and life science articles with women in key authorship roles spent longer under peer review than comparable papers led by men. When women were listed as first author, corresponding author, or both, median timelines ran roughly 7 to 15 days longer. The researchers measured the full interval between submission and acceptance, showing that measurable timing gaps arise within the peer-review process itself.
When authors of biomedical and life science research papers are female, their papers spend longer in peer review.
Janette Lee-Latour, Adapted from Figure 2 of Alvarez-Ponce D, et al. 2026. CC BY 4.0
“These delays can compound over time to affect career trajectories. When production slows, which is a central indicator in science, visibility slows with it,” said Cassidy Sugimoto, an information scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not involved in the new study.
Why Peer Review Takes Longer
To quantify those timelines, the team filtered the PubMed database to identify almost 8 million papers across 8,860 journals with complete submission and acceptance records, most of which were published in the past two decades. Among articles with identifiable authorship gender, women accounted for roughly 43 percent of first authors and about one-third of corresponding authors—proportions large enough to support direct comparisons of review timing.
Although the per-paper difference may seem small, it could accumulate over a publishing career. Using 50 papers as a benchmark to model career output, the authors estimated that women would spend roughly 350 to 750 additional days under review compared with men. Alvarez-Ponce said identifying where those delays originate would require analyses that separate editorial handling, referee evaluation, and author revision.
“Our dataset doesn’t allow us to see where that time is spent,” said David Alvarez-Ponce, a biologist at the University of Nevada, Reno and coauthor of the study.
Erin Hengel, an economist at Brunel University of London who was not associated with the study, said, “The dataset and analytical approach are well suited to detecting disparities in overall submission-to-acceptance timelines within biomedical publishing.” She cautioned, however, that explaining what drives those gaps—and whether they extend to other fields—would require separate investigation.
In her own research, she has analyzed administrative journal records that separate referee evaluation, revision rounds, and author response time in peer review.2 She found that referees spent longer evaluating female-authored papers, that those manuscripts went through more revision rounds, and that authors took longer responding to reviewer feedback. Notably, the gender gaps in peer-review timelines declined as referees gained more experience conducting reviews.
Hengel said that because most referees are men, novice reviewers may be more familiar with male-authored work and lean on that familiarity when they lack experience. Less familiar papers can draw closer scrutiny. “It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s explicit malice or bias,” she explained. “It can just be an informational difference,” she said, as inexperienced referees have less information to guide their decisions.
The University of Nevada, Reno team also tested whether the timing gap persisted after accounting for factors unrelated to gender, including publication year, manuscript length, abstract readability, and number of coauthors. Across these separate analyses, the pattern held: Manuscripts with women in key authorship roles consistently spent longer under review, suggesting that the difference does not simply reflect manuscript characteristics or publishing trends.
The Professional Ripple Effects
Mary Frank Fox, a sociologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not associated with the new study, said that even modest extensions in review time can shape how women’s work is evaluated and recognized. Noting that these differences often intersect with broader patterns of scrutiny, she said, “Delays in career show up most notably in promotion, particularly in promotion to full professor in academic institutions.”3
Sugimoto said this combination of review delays and a higher burden of proof can create a cascade effect. “Heavier revision demands take time away from new investigations,” she said. Science also feels the impact, she added, “Because researchers’ backgrounds can shape what they study, uneven delays can slow how certain ideas circulate.”
If irregular review timelines reflect information gaps among newer referees, Hengel suggested that journals could narrow those gaps by helping novices build experience more deliberately. That could mean clearer guidance on editorial standards, structured reviewing opportunities, training or orientation programs, or pairing newer referees with more experienced reviewers to build familiarity with expectations.
“It would be interesting to see the journals performing a little A/B testing on some of these mechanisms,” she said.
