How long does peer review usually take?
This is hard to estimate. As described above, there are many sources of variation. It may take editors more or less
time to find reviewers in the first place. Once they find reviewers, some journals have a very short timeline for
the reviewers to submit their reviews, and some have a longer timeline. Some reviewers follow that timeline, whereas
some always miss the deadline. Some editors are very proactive in chasing down late reviewers, and some are not.
For that reason, it's very hard to predict how long any given review may take.
That being said, different fields have different standards. In some fields it is typical for review to take 2-3 months
(there will, of course, be a lot of variation around that average), and in others it is typical for review to take a
year.
Investigate how long peer review typically takes in your field. You can try searching websites like https://scirev.org
or https://www.letpub.com, which compile average peer review times for many
journals. Or you can ask around among professors, post-docs, or other students who have published some papers, and
who may have a good idea how long things usually take.
How long can you expect a typical peer review to take in your discipline?
When you submit a paper, you are often asked to suggest some reviewers. To get an idea whom to invite to review your
paper, journal editors will look at your suggestions, as well as your bibliography, and they may do their own
literature search. They may not invite all of the people you suggest; indeed, most editors specifically aim to get
some reviews from the people you suggested and some reviews from the people you did not suggest. For example, if
there is someone who has published many papers in the same topics as yours and you did not suggest them, the editor
may invite them anyway. If your paper strongly criticizes a particular previous paper, the editor might invite the
author of that paper to be your reviewer, even if you did not suggest them.
Generally, if you suggest a reviewer who is a very big name in the field (like Chomsky or something), it is unlikely
that your paper will be reviewed by them; those people are simply too busy, and get too many requests to review, so
they don't have time to review every paper that is sent to them. It is possible your paper might get reviewed by one
of their students or peers (if people don't have time to review, they often offer the editor some names of other
people who could do it).
Think about your own current or proposed doctoral research. Imagine we are three or four years in the future and you
have finished your study, written a paper about it, and are about to submit it to a journal. Who might you suggest
to review your papers? List 3-5 names here.