The peer-review process is a team effort that requires coordination between editors, reviewers, and authors — but it’s editors who do the bulk of that coordinating. At Scholastica, we’ve found that empowering editors to keep the peer review process moving forward is one of the best ways to make academic publishing more efficient and less painful for everyone involved. Our latest feature focuses on just that!

Accept and submit reviews on behalf of reviewers

We encourage all reviewers to sign up for Scholastica to gain access to Scholastica’s on-site academic community and full user benefits. However, when this isn’t possible, editors still need to be able to assign reviewers and record their reviewers’ feedback.

With Scholastica’s latest feature, as an editor, you can now accept a review invitation on behalf of a reviewer and submit a review on a reviewer’s behalf.:

Submit on behalf

Actions taken by editors on behalf of reviewers during the peer review process will always be distinguishable from actions taken by the reviewers themselves, by text that says “by editor.” Hovering your cursor over the “by editor” text will reveal which editor moved the review along.:

Editor

Another new feature we’re sure will be helpful to our editors is advanced manuscript searching. You can now search for specific manuscript fields, such as title or abstract, and receive results that only match those parts of the text.

Advanced search

For example, if you type “author: Johnson”, you’ll now be able to only see results for manuscripts with authors (including co-authors) that match the name “Johnson.” The fields you can search include title, author-submitted keywords, abstract, editor tags, and author names. This new search functionality will make it easier for editors to locate exactly what they are looking for.

For detailed examples of and instructions to use the new search functionality, check out our help article on the topic. Please feel free to reach out to us via chat or email with any questions about our two newest features as well!

Keep on coordinating editors — we have you covered!

Austin Brown
This post was written by Austin Brown