Aries Systems Corporation

Identifying and securing qualified peer Reviewers is a common challenge for scholarly publications. As the volume of incoming submissions increases, it often exceeds the capacity of the editorial desk’s legacy go-to Reviewers. The journal’s pool of legacy Reviewers then becomes stale and overburdened, which causes publishers to increasingly rely on external databases for potential candidates. However, it is traditionally a highly manual and time-consuming process for editorial staff to search and screen review candidates, which can contribute to costly bottlenecks in the workflow.

Recognizing a need to streamline this process for Editors, Aries Systems has partnered with several third-party databases and industry-leading technology providers. Through our expansive ecosystem of connected tools, Aries Systems offers automated Reviewer search and screening solutions directly within the editorial workflow. Our partnership Prophy allows publishers to leverage their Referee Finder solution, a Reviewer searching platform and matching tool, which is seamlessly integrated with Editorial Manager® (EM).

With over 85 million researchers drawn from a collection of 175+ million articles, Referee Finder helps diversify and expand the journal’s network of subject experts in physical sciences, engineering, life sciences and medicine, economics, and social sciences. Referee Finder automatically extracts manuscript metadata from EM – such as Author names to identify conflicts of interest, affiliations, and references – and conducts a full-text analysis of the manuscript. Through their Artificial Intelligence (AI) semantic scoring structure, Referee Finder automatically matches the manuscript against researchers in their system – generating a list of up to 50 recommended Reviewers in less than 15 seconds.

Editors can access the Referee Finder platform directly from their workflow in EM to conduct a more in-depth evaluation of the candidates – including their publication history, research topics and affiliations, h-index and citations, and Prophy ranking scores – or modify their search with flexible filter options or entering an Author name. Referee Finder automatically flags candidates with potential conflicts of interest based on co-authorship and co-affiliation from the search results, supporting the screening process. Once the Editor has completed their search, they may continue with their standard invitation process in EM and a people record is created for the selected Reviewers if needed. Through this powerful integration, publishers can streamline and expand the search and screening process without any disruption to their existing workflow through automated, AI-based ranking and daily updates to their database of collected articles.

To see this exciting integration in action, check out our tutorial video below. A comprehensive, step-by-step guide on the integration is also available!

To take advantage of Prophy’s Referee Finder solution in EM, contact the Prophy team at https://www.prophy.ai/ or info@prophy.ai.