Page 9 - Straive eBook: Redefining Your Peer Review Experience

Straive | Redefining Your Peer Review Experience 9

As with technical checks, there is opportunity here to support more rapid and more
consistent editorial decision-making using machine learning technology, such as SciScore’s
methodological review tool or iThenticate — which, again, could be presented to authors if
publishers wish to facilitate pre-submission amendments.

Suggestions

• Provide support to editors to enable rapid editorial screening via machine
learning tools.
• Consider making these tools available to authors before they complete the
submission process.

Reviewer identification

Just 20 years ago, identifying peer reviewers was straightforward: editors approached
colleagues they knew and trusted to provide a report. Today, the combination of rapid growth
in submissions and the increasingly specialist focus of articles has made this “old boys’
network” approach unsustainable. Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives have also played
an increasingly large role in encouraging editors to look beyond their usual cohorts for review.

Reviewer identification has become correspondingly more elaborate, including careful
screening for potential conflicts of interest — working in the same department as or having
previously co-authored with any of the article’s authors, for example. Most journals have a
database of reviewers, ranging from a carefully curated and heavily used list to a register of
previous authors largely ignored by the editorial board. Many peer review systems offer
reviewer search tools with access to PubMed or Google Scholar, bringing back results based
on article abstract matches. Some publishers are experimenting with tools like Unsilo’s
Reviewer Finder to create better matched, richer lists of potential reviewers based on full-text
analysis. Straive has a team of subject matter experts (SMEs) dedicated to reviewer
identification, using their own knowledge and a custom search solution to pull up a list of
relevant reviewers and ensure they have no conflicts of interest.

And, as mentioned earlier, some journals ask authors to suggest preferred and non-preferred
reviewers during submission. Unfortunately, whatever the tools in place, we have arrived at a
situation where some researchers are overloaded with review requests and others hardly
contacted. Broadening the pool of potential reviewers by reaching out to under-represented
parts of the community, in terms of both geography and career stage, can only be beneficial.