BMJ to expand reviewer pool with new software from Thomson Reuters

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Thomson Reuters has announced a collaboration with British Medical Journals (BMJ), to optimise the efficiency of the article peer-review process and address the problem of reviewer fatigue. The collaboration will use ScholarOne Reviewer Locator, an extension of ScholarOne Manuscripts, the peer-review and online-submission programme for scholarly publishers.

Reviewer Locator promises to help BMJ to find qualified reviewers quickly. The system works through a complex search algorithm that identifies article-level meta-data in Web of Science, the scientific search and discovery platform in science, social science, and arts and humanities citation indexes, to find reviewers with established publication records. Reviewer Locator then automatically recommends potential peer reviewers based on this analysis. Editors of BMJ journals can use these recommendations to supplement their already-established networks of reviewers and avoid over working their core reviewer pool. This is expected to lead to faster turnaround times for authors and more informative reviews.

‘One of the biggest industry challenges facing scholarly publishers and societies is finding relevant, qualified reviewers for article peer review,’ said Peter Ashman, publishing director at BMJ. ‘We are excited to be working with Thomson Reuters to expand our network of reviewers with ScholarOne Manuscripts’ Reviewer Locator, which will help us improve our services to editors and our partner societies.’

Jasper Simons, vice president of product and marketing strategy, publishing & associations at Thomson Reuters said ‘We are pleased to collaborate with BMJ to help improve the peer-review workflow,’ adding ‘Thomson Reuters is committed to ensuring our clients can better serve their fields of research with best-in-class technology to simplify and expedite the scholarly publishing process for editors, researchers and publishers.’