Acceptance Rates in Physical Review Letters: No Seasonal Bias

Are editorial decisions biased? A recent discussion in Learned Publishing has focused on one aspect of potential bias in editorial decisions, namely seasonal (e.g., monthly) variations in acceptance rates of research journals. In this letter, we contribute to the discussion by analyzing data from Physical Review Letters (PRL), a journal published by the American Physical Society. We studied the 190,106 papers submitted to PRL from January 1990 until September 2012. No statistically significant variations were found in the monthly acceptance rates. We conclude that the time of year that the authors of a paper submit their work to PRL has no effect on the fate of the paper through the review process.