How long does it take an author to add their article?

[jvwong]

Purpose

Try to answer, with evidence: How long does it take for the typical author to add their article?

Methods

• Documents
  • Sample: 293 of the 307 author-submitted ('public') documents (October 10, 2023)
  • NB: There may have been a few initial submissions where we didn't even have these status back in 2021
• Elapsed time
  • The time between Document status 'initiated' to 'submitted'
  • NB: Information was drawn from '_ops' database field which tracks operations on documents
• Interactions
  • NB: Included intra-complex

Results

Table: Summary statistics

Stat	elapsedMin	numInteractions
Min	0.2	0.0
Max	543498.2	43.0
Median	6.9	2.0
Mean	4841.5	3.1

Figure 1. Distribution of interactions per document

Figure 2. Distribution of elapsed time per document

[jvwong]

Rethinkdb query: db_create2submit.txt

[jvwong]

Some summary stats:

FIELD1	Min	Lower Quartile	Median	Upper Quartile	Max	IQR	Lower Bound	Upper Bound	COUNT
elapsedMin	0.2	3.3	6.9	15.7	543498.2	12.4	0.0	34.4	242
numInteractions	0.0	1.0	2.0	4.0	43.0	3.0	0.0	8.5	242

And after removing outliers:

[maxkfranz]

Here’s how I interpret the numbers at first glance:

(1) The median is around 3 minutes. Most of the area of the curve looks to be left of 6 minutes.

(2) There’s a long tail. Some people create giant figures with lots of interactions, though most don’t. Some people start drawing a figure, get distracted (e.g. by email or by getting a coffee) and come back to finish the figure. I examined some of the longer ones in the admin panel, and the ones I saw matched this take-a-break-and-come-back pattern with the timing of the editor actions/operations.