Qfyilyi

I'm a PhD student and I need to (almost desperately) squeeze in another paper for my dissertation in the next 6 months. Is it acceptable to explain my situation to the editor and ask to set a tighter deadline to the reviewers?

My field is health sciences and biostatistics.

You can ask for just about anything, but unless you already have some connection to the editor you aren't likely to have much happen out of the ordinary. In particular, they are unlikely to move you ahead of another author and you would probably object if the situation were reversed.

The editor has little control over what his/her reviewers do or their schedules. If he/she tries to press them, they might just turn the paper back and you get in line again. The editor is unlikely to move on a paper without reviews. The time it takes is the time it takes.

Note that in some ways the reviewer "stable" is more important to the editor than the current bunch of authors since there is a long term relationship between editors and reviewers. Since they probably aren't paid, there is little leverage.

But you can ask.

@Buffy is right that you're unlikely to be able to influence processing speed for a given journal.

One of the axes on which journals compete is their processing speed. SciRev provides a platform for comparison (note that reviews are provided by authors, so you should be appropriately skeptical). Googling "academic journal processing time" points you to a variety of other discussions/comparisons. Sometimes journals provide this information on their web pages.

Thus you could aim for a venue with rapid turnaround. Unfortunately for you, in my experience there's a correlation between selectivity/flashiness and rapid turnaround (e.g. high-impact journals often ask for reviewers to return reviews on a very short time scale), so you might have trouble getting your paper accepted in such a publication. It may be that some of the less-traditional, more open venues such as PeerJ have relatively fast turnaround times.

You obviously know the policies of your advisor/institution better than we do, but (again in my experience, in not totally unrelated fields) it's often sufficient to have a paper submitted to a reputable journal for it to count toward a dissertation; this rule prevents the committee from having to deal with crappy manuscripts in an early stage of preparation, but insulates the students from the vagaries of the publication process. I'd definitely recommend double-checking with someone knowledgeable ...