We continue the investigation for more than 2,150 astrophysics papers published from July 2007 to June 2008 of various possible correlations among time from submission to acceptance; nationalities of lead authors; numbers of citations to the papers in three years after publication; subdisciplines; and numbers of authors. Paper I found that submissions from American authors were accepted faster than others but by only about 3. 8 days out of a median of 105 days. Here we report the following additional relationships: (1) the correlation of citation rate with lag time is weak, the most cited papers having intermediate lag times, (2) citation rates are highest for papers with European and American authors and much smaller for papers from less-developed (etc.) countries, with other prosperous countries in between, (3) citation rates are much larger for currently hot topics (exoplanets, cosmology), than for less hot ones (binary stars, for instance), (4) papers with many authors (seven to more than 100) are more often cited than 1-2 author ones, but this is not linear, and author numbers are not much correlated with lag times, and (5) the lag time for hot topics is about the same as that for less hot topics, which surprised us. Of specific subfields, solar papers are, on average, accepted fastest, quite often within less than 2 months. We don't know why. © 2012 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.

It has been shown that papers in stem cell research submitted from institutions in the USA are accepted faster than those submitted from elsewhere and that the cause might at least partly be some bias in the refereeing process. We investigate whether there is a similar difference in time scale for papers in astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology and look briefly at some of the possible causes. We find a publication time lag of 3.8 days (out of a median time of 105 days) while in the stem cell case it is 24 days out of a median of 83 days. One of many possible causes is a difference in how useful the papers are to the community, and we will assess this in a second paper making use of citation analysis. © 2011 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.