Manuscripts and Metadata: Peer Review in the Digital Age

By Stephen Reynolds and Summer Tredgett

Contrary to the common caricature, the academic world has long been defined more by tech than by tweed. From the typewriting of manuscripts in the 60s to the launch of the first online humanities journal, Postmodern Culture, in 1990,[1] and the founding of JSTOR in 1994, scholarship has consistently embraced contemporary innovations in ways that enhance its rigour and reach. While today’s innovations undoubtedly bring challenges for academic publishers – such as facilitating fraud and plagiarism – they have also made the peer review process more accessible, reliable, and efficient.

Let’s start with authors. The research landscape has been re-shaped by the development of online libraries and databases. Citation indices now allow authors to chart the life of an idea from its inception through its various iterations, expanding the referential map. Writing itself has evolved: the journey that began with spellcheck has arrived at generative tools designed to consolidate resources, compile bibliographies, and draft abstracts.

But perhaps the most significant innovation for authors involved in peer review is the online submission platform. Gone are the days of mailing manuscripts to a journal’s head office and waiting for its red-inked return. Today, authors need only create an account and upload their submission. Week by week, they can log in and check its status, amend their materials, revise their arguments, and even – with Sage Path, for example – switch to a more suitable publication.

How about editors? They face the challenge of recruiting expert reviewers to uphold high standards and best practices in peer review. By targeting subject matter experts with aligned research interests, editors can limit the number of reviewer invites sent and reduce the total time between submission and publication. In this way, digital tools can ease the burden of manually searching for reviewers, support editors in locating candidates in the relevant field, and reduce time to publication for authors.

The Web of Science Reviewer Locator, integrated in our Sage Track online peer review system, is an innovation that exemplifies this. This powerful tool simplifies reviewer selection by analysing submission metadata and cross-referencing it with Web of Science’s publication and citation indices, as well as their extensive peer review database. This process generates a list of potential reviewers who have published in the same field as the current submission, plus details on each reviewer, such as their associated institutions, the number of authored articles in Web of Science, and a selection of their most relevant articles. Editors can also explore the reviewer’s credentials through their Web of Science profile, gaining insights into their publication, peer review, and editorial histories. This hybrid approach to reviewer selection not only provides editors with support in this task, but also ensures that digital tools are not solely relied upon to make such decisions.

If digital tools can alleviate an editor’s workload, how can they assist the reviewers themselves? It’s no secret that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) platforms are facing intense scrutiny in academic publishing. In the realm of peer review, the focus is on free-to-access GenAI platforms like ChatGPT, which authors and reviewers can use to generate new content and refine language.

While there are valid concerns about introducing GenAI to peer review, these platforms can play a key role in supporting reviewers to provide feedback. Take the case of non-native English-speaking (NNES) reviewers, who might face challenges when writing reviews in English. Some journal management systems allow review quality to be rated by editors, potentially disadvantaging NNES reviewers – due to language barriers – and deterring them from volunteering to review. By utilizing AI tools for language editing, NNES reviewers can improve the clarity, grammar, and structure of their reports. This could help to amplify, rather than silence, their voices, broadening access to peer review.

To ensure peer review remains fit-for-purpose, it’s crucial to strike a balance between research integrity and the swift dissemination of new findings. Digital tools play a pivotal role in achieving this, and in doing so, they empower academics to answer the call of Henry Oldenburg, the first editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and a central figure in the history of peer review. With digitized content ubiquitous, and open access models evolving, scholars today are uniquely equipped to – in Oldenburg’s words – "impart their knowledge to one another and contribute what they can to the Grand design of improving natural knowledge.” [2]

[1] See https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern-culture, and the journal’s website: https://www.pomoculture.org/about/

[2] See Oldenburg’s Introduction to the first issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, dated 6 March 1665. Available at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rstl.1665.0002

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About the Authors

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Summer Tredgett joined Sage as an Editorial Assistant – Peer Review Management, in December 2023. In this role, she works with editors, reviewers and authors to manage the peer review process, and provides support on Sage’s peer review system and policies.

Prior to joining Sage, Summer’s interest in academic peer review was fuelled by her previous experience as a Medical Writer, which involved working with industry researchers to navigate submission and publication processes across a range of online peer review systems.

Stephen Reynolds is an Editorial Assistant – Peer Review Management at Sage. Before joining Sage, he was a criminal barrister specialising in criminal defence. Before that, he taught philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he was awarded his doctorate.