Digital tools, and now AI-based tools, can make life easier for journal editors. In tasks like manuscript management, finding peer reviewers, and analyzing impact, digital tools on online platforms help move manuscripts to publication faster and more reliably.
This post covers digital tools, including artificial intelligence (AI) tools, mapped to journal editors’ daily tasks. Editorial Manager, ScholarOne, Open Journal Systems, and Web of Science probably ring a bell. Beyond those big names, you’ll likely find something new and valuable here. One, or a stack, of these innovations might be just what your editorial flow needs.
*Mention of these tools does not imply endorsement, and in this dynamic arena, tool names and functions change frequently.
Manuscript submission and workflow management
The tools in this section are comprehensive platforms for managing processes from submission to publication. They vary by their interfaces, ease of use, and features. As a journal editor, you’re likely already using one of them. Some are new, flexible, and adapting to the times. Some also incorporate research integrity solutions, to varying degrees. The first two dominate the market but can be costly, making open-source solutions an attractive option.
ScholarOne: The foundational ScholarOne Manuscripts online platform configures workflows tailored to specific journal needs using best practices, and can create workflows. Its intuitive interface and third-party tools automatically extract data like titles, abstracts, and authors from submitted work. Editors can process manuscripts, select peer reviewers, and send out documents uploaded by authors and reviewers.
Editorial Manager: This cloud platform offers a customizable workflow system that lets you, as an editor, assign tasks to reviewers and authors in their assigned roles. It includes the Enterprise Analytics Reporting suite and ProduXion Manager to facilitate editing and proofing after acceptance.
Benchpress2: This customizable digital platform for the publication process offers multiple user access levels and single sign-on. It includes collaborative messaging and custom analytics reports to meet specific needs. You can track manuscripts through the publication process. Benchpress2 stands out for its collaborative features, including multi-level user access and single sign-on.
Manuscript Manager: This platform operates on a pay-per-manuscript pricing model, which helps you start using it without up-front costs. The provider offers free setup support and requires no binding contracts. You can also run parallel trials alongside your existing systems.
Open Journal Systems: An open-source manuscript submission and peer review solution, this tool has features comparable to other mainstream platforms. The open-source aspect sets this one apart, as it supports community-driven software development, which enables customization and integration without licensing fees.
Scholastica – This company offer a robust platform for hosting and managing open-access journals. It’s cost-effective and easy to manage.
Morressier Journal Management – A new, “next-generation” journal submission and peer review system that emphasizes integrity in publishing (a stance the company already addresses in its Integrity Manager solution).
EasyChair – From a slightly different angle than the above tools, EasyChair is a one-stop conference management solution. It addresses the range of scholarly conference elements, such as calls for, and acceptance of, abstract and paper submissions; reviewer management and reviewing processes, and preparing conference proceedings.
Finding and managing peer reviewers
This set of more dedicated tools helps manage your peer reviewer roster, identify prospects, and even play a part in incentivizing overburdened and uncompensated reviewers. They can save you valuable time and effort, allowing you to focus on more strategic aspects of your role as a journal editor.
Reviewer Credits: This progressive platform helps you find reviewers from its large database of qualified candidates with detailed profiles and review histories. It streamlines the matching process, enabling you to identify suitable peer reviewers quickly. It also helps balance the North/South imbalance, allowing more diverse reviewers, while, for the reviewers, it has a unique point-based incentive system. Learn more about Reviewer Credits’ benefits for editors here.
Reviewer Finder: Enter the manuscript title, abstract, and author names into this search tool to get a list of reviewer profiles. Click on each name in the list to see their research background and affiliations. The tool flags conflicts of interest and lets you save your search results.
Prophy – This AI-driven solutions provider, which is a Reviewer Credits partner, has a suite of tools for matching manuscripts with appropriate peer reviewers. It accesses a database of over 150 million articles to ensure a diverse and relevant selection of reviewers. It also has tools for tracking research impact and managing editorial boards.
GlobalCampus — This AI-driven platform facilitates the discovery of academic literature, experts, and journals. It uses semantic search to match content, enabling users to pinpoint experts based on the substance of their work rather than traditional bibliometric indicators. The platform’s approach lets users analyze the content of publications to find experts/candidate reviewers with relevant expertise.
Web of Science Reviewer Locator: This reviewer search tool helps by matching manuscript details with potential reviewers based on their publishing profiles. This tool is bolstered by its use of WoS’s own data for greater accuracy. It can be integrated into existing editorial systems.
Reviewer Recommender: Advanced algorithms in this tool match manuscripts with suitable reviewers based on their expertise and past publications. It integrates with submission systems to improve the reviewer selection process.
Journal/Author Name Estimator (JANE): Input a paper’s title or abstract to find suitable reviewers. JANE identifies matching authors with relevant expertise by comparing the document to millions of PubMed entries.
Ethical compliance and detecting plagiarism
Amid your daily tasks, these tools can help you maintain the integrity of published articles. They can assist you, as a journal editor, in upholding high standards and ensuring your journal’s reliability. AI text identification is an evolving feature in all of these, and the quality of the different tools may vary. For this reason, adding a dedicated AI detection tool may be helpful.
iThenticate: This tool uses its Crossref Similarity check to detect plagiarism and AI-generated text in submitted manuscripts, weeding out underhanded authors and ensuring original work. Upload a manuscript, and it will highlight ethical issues, letting you maintain high research standards. IEEE, SpringerNature, Wiley, and other big names rely on this popular tool.
Turnitin: With this tool, journal editors have a solid tool to spot plagiarism. It uses a database from top publishers like Elsevier and SpringerNature for thorough checks. It also has features for reviewing student work. iThentiate also detects AI text. You can also access its PlagScan online tool for a quick-and-easy solution.
QuillBot: Get a monthly subscription to QuillBot to access a suite of tools, including a plagiarism checker and AI text detector. You can use its Google Chrome browser extension to keep using its features on websites.
Copyscape: An online plagiarism detection tool that’s not just for academic text, as it’s a popular go-to among web admins and content owners. That doesn’t make it any less valuable for journal editors. It scans texts for duplicate content and provides detailed reports on potential matches. The basic service is free, and Copyscape Premium offers a more robust suite of functions.
GPTZero: This suite of detection tools spots AI-generated text in manuscripts. Public tests have found its performance to be better than that of most competitors, which can justify it as an add-on standalone tool. Several security certifications attest to its performance.
Verifying authors and reviewers
This tricky step can span the years of a researcher’s career over different titles and locations. These digital resources help corroborate the information, saving you time validating author and reviewer profiles.
ORCID: This digital identifier system offers unique ORCID iDs for researchers, matching authors with their publications. It helps enable more efficient access to reliable records of researchers’ professional activities and work history.
Publons: The Publons platform recognizes and records researchers’ peer review and editorial contributions, as they build their profiles. Clarivate Analytics acquired it in 2017, and it now integrates with other platforms like Web of Science and ORCID. Editors can use it to search and verify researchers through their ResearcherID.
Scopus Author Search & Identifier: This search engine tool offers an alternative for finding author profiles with verified publications and affiliations. Based on data in the Scopus database, the tool generates and uses a Scopus Author ID for registered authors.
Google Scholar: This search engine for scholarly texts lets researchers create profiles to help disseminate their work, among its many features. Journal editors, along with searching for reviewers and verifying texts, can access a researcher’s publication history and citation metrics based on these profiles.
ResearchGate: This well-established social network is for researchers to promote themselves and connect with/follow other researchers. Editors can access openly available author profiles and their associates under the Research Lab profiles.
Impact tracking and analytics
As a journal editor, your duties don’t end after the article review and acceptance. New tools can help track, measure, and boost article impact. Use them after publishing articles in your journal.
PlumX Metrics: This set of software widgets lets you track journal impact through real-time metrics, such as downloads, social media mentions, and citations. You can add these to your editorial management platforms.
Crossref: A digital system that tracks and connects citations to publications with DOIs. Search for your journal’s articles and get detailed metadata and reports. Further, analyze trends and metrics to view your journal’s influence.
Altmetric: Tracks your journal’s impact by aggregating mentions from social media, news, and other sources. Features like the Attention Score and detailed graphs help monitor dissemination and identify influential articles.
Dimensions: Monitor your journal’s impact with analytics from sources like publications, grants, and patents. Use performance reviews and competitor benchmarks to make informed decisions.
Journal Citation Reports: This tool can help you compare your journal’s performance with other journals. You can make data-based editorial decisions by exploring various indicators, graphic charts, and illustrations.
AI-based tools
Ai is so much more than ChatGPT. The recent rise of AI tools is a momentous change, but are they helpful or disruptive? Or both? Here are some tools to aid you as a journal editor in your daily tasks.
Penelope.ai: This compliance automation checker verifies that manuscripts meet your journal’s rules. It has over 30 checks for ethics, conflict of interest, data sharing, and more. The generated reports show authors what to adjust before re-submitting.
Aether Brain: This AI-powered research assistant summarizes manuscripts and offers insights. Also, it has tools for ‘chatting’ with the manuscript and answering your questions based on the manuscript.
Elicit: This research paper analyzer offers unique features for time-consuming tasks. Its main advantage is that it can pull details from multiple papers into a table. It can also identify themes and concepts across a set of manuscripts.
Humata.ai: A document analysis tool that summarizes large PDF documents, enables interactive chats with manuscripts, and provides answers with citations. As an AI solution, it can improve your editorial process by boosting existing platforms and tools.
Perplexity: This diverse AI tool functions like a multiheaded ChatGPT. While it can do GPT-like searches using the GPT engine (or Claude and other chatbots), it enhances its responses by scouring the web for multiple sources. Depending on the engine used, it’s still prone to “hallucinations” (made-up/fake information), but this aspect continues to improve. Use it to verify, paraphrase, and search 8it has a dedicated “Academic” search), or take it a step further and modify your queries so it can perform tasks for you.
Journal editors: You need this peer review tool in your toolbelt
Hopefully, this list clarified or even introduced you to something new. Reviewer Credits is committed to lightening the load for journal editors in the peer review process. It’s a tool you can feel good about using. And you’ll join the growing list of scholarly editors who rely on Reviewer Credits to ease their workload.
Whether you’re struggling to find a responsible reviewer in a niche area or to find someone new and reliable to supplement your roster, you’ll find a large and diverse database of motivated reviewers. See more about how Reviewer Credits can find best-fit peer reviewers and be a journal editor’s best friend in the exhausting peer review process.
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