Harnessing technology to boost diversity, equity and inclusion in peer review

The Find Reviewers tool scans millions to put a diverse and inclusive selection at your fingertips

When COVID-19 broke out, Scientific Editorial Manager Denise Wells abre em uma nova guia/janela was faced with a problem familiar to many journal editors: a shortage of peer reviewers. Denise’s regular cohort of trusted reviewers was now mostly in the lab seeking cures. She knew the value of a diverse and inclusive range of voices and took this as an opportunity to broaden her network of reviewers. The problem was how to find skilled and relevant reviewers among the millions of researchers listed on Scopus.

Find Reviewers to the rescue

Denise turned to the Find Reviewers tool abre em uma nova guia/janela and was quickly won over by the ease and speed of using it to find what she needed. “We received great reviewers,” said Denise. “It was a win-win for everyone. We had a need for expanding the reviewer pool in this area, and some early career researchers really wanted to review. It was perfect.”

As well as increasing the reviewer pool, the Find Reviewers tool abre em uma nova guia/janela is a highly effective way to help ensure diversity and inclusion in peer reviewing, which is essential to improving the quality of both research and life, Denise emphasizes.

“Our goal is to improve life on the planet, for everybody in society,” she says. “Keeping that mindset about inclusivity and diversity promotes innovation and development. That’s really necessary for progress in science. But even more than that, it’s really critical for the betterment of society.”

User-friendly technology

The tool uses AI and machine learning models to match a paper’s field and area with researchers selected for their expertise and availability and who are diverse across age, gender, and location. As an editor who has spent her entire career in peer review and editorial, Denise helped assess early versions of Find Reviewers and says the latest version of the tool is robust and easy to master, and spending just twenty minutes using the tool can already yield results.

“It’s so well organized that it’s not onerous,” she comments. “The tool allows editors to delve as deep as they want in the various aspects… I love it.”

Enabling a global view

Editors are using Find Reviewers in increasing numbers, with 60% of all invitations sent by editors to reviewers this year now going through Find Reviewers, up from c. 40% two years ago, and this is at a time when submission numbers have grown exponentially.

For editors, the core benefit of Find Reviewers is the ability to strategically sift through the approximately 17 million authors in the Scopus database to find the best reviewers for a particular paper without missing anyone. The tool also gives editors an opportunity to boost the profiles of those reviewers who may previously have been overlooked.

“The editors’ view is now global,” comments Product Manager Ahmed Fakrouni abre em uma nova guia/janela. “They can now reach people across the world in different areas and different industries. Find Reviewers gives more people the opportunity to peer review, regardless of their gender or where they’re from. The tool suggests people based on their merits rather than any sort of bias.”

Human input remains essential

The first step in ensuring diversity and inclusion in the peer review process rests on an editor’s decision to use Find Reviewers. Once the tool has come up with a ranked list of reviewers, editors can then choose to refine the search findings to find the best possible fit for their needs. This ensures the selection process stays firmly within editors’ hands.

Selections can be streamlined by the editor’s choice of keywords. For example, when seeking reviewers for a highly specific topic, editors can drill down further into the selection offered to identify reviewers with specialized expertise. Editors can also choose to inspect each candidate’s profile themselves.

“In terms of the human element, the editor can add on another search layer if they would like to really home in on specific skillset,” Ahmed explains. “Then they can refine the list further to arrive at their final list.”

The technology behind Find Reviewers was built based on editors’ decisions and behavior. Principal Data Scientist Rob Koeling abre em uma nova guia/janela says the Find Reviewers tool mirrors human behavior, mimicking how editors select reviewers. We are developing technology that can help improve that process by focusing on diversity and inclusion in age, gender and location.

“Those three dimensions are important for us in terms of fairness, and we try to make sure that the distribution of the people that are invited are similar to the distributions in our author populations,” he explains.

Notwithstanding the intricacies of its inner workings, Find Reviewers has been successfully honed into a user-friendly tool that enables editors to quickly and effectively find a diverse, equitable and inclusive set of referees. It’s ready and waiting to help with your next reviewer search.