Finding qualified peer reviewers is hard enough. Once you have them in your database, you need to be able to quickly determine who is the best fit to invite to review new submissions (and who isn’t) to protect the time of those vital volunteers and your journal editors.
We’re continually enhancing Scholastica’s Peer Review System to improve editorial efficiency, particularly around streamlining reviewer workflows. In our latest round of updates, we’ve introduced features to help you find targeted reviewers faster.
What’s changed? The latest updates include:
- New reviewer search views — you can switch between a card view with reviewer photos and profile details or a list view with an easy-to-scan table. Both views are sortable!
- Expanded reviewer filtering and search to help you quickly pinpoint the best people to contact for specific assignments.
- New Manuscript Quick View panel you can use to cross-check manuscript and reviewer criteria without leaving the reviewers search page.
- Improved reviewer invitation workflow, including easier invite template creation, personalization, and deadline setting.
Read on to learn more!
Quickly find relevant reviewers with advanced search, filtering, and sorting options
Now, when you go to the reviewer search page from a manuscript, you’ll find expanded search and filtering options to help you identify relevant candidates and send targeted invitations faster.
Starting with search, in addition to looking for options within your reviewer pool, you can also find relevant new potential reviewers within Scholastica’s scholar network via a “Platform-wide” search tab.
You can search your reviewer database and platform-wide to look for reviewers by criteria including research interests, institution, and department. You can also search your reviewer pool for specific people by name or custom reviewer tags your team has added to contacts (more on this below). Both search bars support multi-word searches when you put key phrases in quotations (e.g., “environmental science”).
With the new reviewer filter options, you can also more easily narrow down to contacts that meet specific criteria, including:
- Subject matter expertise: Filter contacts by institution, department, or research interests in the “Your Reviewers” and “Platform-wide” tabs to find relevant reviewers fast. You can also filter your reviewers by custom tags your editors add (for example, you might create tags for narrow research areas to easily find subject-matter experts in hyper-specialized disciplines).
- Reviewer activity: Filter your reviewers based on their assignment history, including when they were last invited, when they last completed a review, and whether they have pending invitations or late reviews. This will help you quickly distinguish between new and known reviewers, those who tend to be reliable versus those who may need extra reminders, and those who likely have bandwidth versus those who are already busy with assignments.
- Other custom tags you set: Your team can also add custom tags to your reviewers to filter by additional criteria that matter to you (we know this varies by journal!). For example, you might create tags to filter by reviewer comment quality (e.g., detailed comments, limited comments), known availability status (e.g., available frequently, on sabbatical, no bandwidth), or career stage (e.g., senior scholar, post doc, etc.).
You can switch between card and list views in the “Your Reviewers” and “Platform-wide” search tabs and sort contacts in each tab by available criteria, including past review activity for your reviewers.
Quick user tip: If there are reviewers in your database who are no longer available to complete assignments or will be unavailable for an extended period of time and you want to hide them from your reviewers page, you can archive those contacts and unarchive them later if applicable.
Check manuscript details without leaving the reviewers page using the New Manuscript Quick View
As you’re homing in on relevant reviewers, we know you may need to cross-reference their details with those of the manuscript you’re trying to assign. In the past, that meant switching between manuscript and reviewer pages, but not anymore.
We’ve added a Manuscript Details Quick View side panel to the Reviewers page so you can check the manuscript information you need without leaving the page (yay, less context switching!).
The Manuscript Details Quick View side panel includes the paper’s abstract, authors, keywords, author-suggested reviewers, reviewers to avoid, and editor notes.
Easily send personalized reviewer invitations with associated deadlines
Finally, we’ve improved the reviewer invitation workflow. Now, you can personalize emails further with reviewer name merge tags, and all merge tags include validation (you’ll know you’ve input a valid merge tag when it turns green).
You can also add separate deadlines to reviewer invitation emails for when the reviewer must accept or decline the assignment and when they have to submit it, should they (hopefully!) agree to review, so those expectations are clear.
To support your reviewer invitation workflow, remember to configure your desired cadence for sending automatic assignment reminders to reviewers who accept your invitations (e.g., every week or two weeks) and how you want to handle late assignments. For late assignments, you can set past-due reminders or have Scholastica automatically revoke those invitations. Learn more in this help document.
Quick user tip: If you have a reviewer in mind for a manuscript and they don’t yet have a Scholastica account, you can invite them by email right from the Reviewers page.
Smoother reviewer management starts now
These latest reviewer management features are now available to all Scholastica Peer Review System users, with no setup steps on your part. This new functionality is another step in Scholastica’s ongoing efforts to help scholarly journal teams operate more efficiently, so they can keep scaling their publications sustainably.
Stay tuned for future feature updates, and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us — we’re here to help!
