How long does it take you to write a paper/the first draft ? - (Jun/28/2014 )

Just out of interest, how long did you need to write a paper ? I really mean just the time from when you had all the data and started writing till it was ready for submission.

And: Is it realistic to write up a very first draft in a few days ?? Can you share how long you approximately need for your first draft ? (I'm aware this probably also depends a lot on how long /complex the paper is)

yes it depends a lot on complexity, time you need for other work, getting familiar with new statistics and whatever ...a few weeks to more than half a year (but for the first)

I don't think you can get any specific answers to this. It depends on milion things and half of them may be different on every workplace/state/journal/...

For example I wrote first draft of the paper in four days, because I was ordered to. Then there was a kind of change of mind.That was four years ago. It's still not submited yet.

For reviews of course it is different. There you create it by writing and not only by assembling results and adding some test to it. Writing reviews depends a lot on how good writer are you (I'm a terrible one).

Also one thing it to submit the forst version, the second is what may reviewers want to change/add/restructure etc. Sometimes they want you to make several new experiments, so there may be months before you can submit new version. (but this happen mostly in good journals only, for a high impact journal we need to calculate with about a year from submission to publication in printed journal)

My reply is very late, but I still wanted to say thanks for your comments !

Trof on Mon Jun 30 09:47:16 2014 said:

 

For example I wrote first draft of the paper in four days, because I was ordered to. Then there was a kind of change of mind.That was four years ago. It's still not submited yet.

A first draft in a few days, that's what I'll probably also do. Even though I'm sure it won't be nearly good enough for anything, but I thought it might be better than to sit for ages on the "building bricks" without moving forward, as is currently the case for me.