Steps to Strengthen Your Reviewer Profile

It is widely acknowledged that there is a lack of formal training for early career researchers trying to become peer reviewers, especially how to be invited to review for a journal. In order to increase your chances of being selected as a reviewer, here are some tips to strengthen your reviewer profile on our online submission and peer review systems.

1)      Identify which journal you’d like to review for

Browse our journals by subject and click through to find more information about each one, including the aims & scope, editorial board, and information about the peer review process. If the journal has specific guidelines for reviewers, this is where you’ll find them.

2)      Register for an account on the journal’s online submission and peer review system

Many SAGE journals use SAGE Track, a peer review program based on the industry leading ScholarOne Manuscripts system developed in conjunction with ScholarOne. Once you’ve found a journal you’d like to review for, create an account in that journal’s SAGE Track system. Since each journal has their own reviewer pools, you will need to create an account for every journal you are interested in reviewing for.

3)      Provide an institutional and verifiable email address

Many Editors will verify reviewers before inviting them to ensure they have expertise in the manuscript’s subject matter and prevent reviewer fraud. Therefore, we suggest providing an up-to-date institutional email address since it can be easily verified. Providing a personal email address, such as Gmail, can be tricky for Editors to confirm your suitability for a paper. We recognise that your institutional email address may not be the inbox you use most regularly, so our peer review system allows you to provide a secondary email address if you would prefer our communications to be routed elsewhere.

4)      Create an ORCID and associate it with your SAGE Track

As a supporting member of ORCID, we at SAGE encourage all authors and reviewers to create an ORCID ID and associate it with their accounts in our online peer review system. ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from other contributors and allows Editors to easily access key information about you, such as your up-to-date publication record. This helps to quickly establish whether your research focus aligns with the paper under review. You can read more about our partnership with ORCID here.

5)      Provide keywords

Some journals will provide a list of keywords to choose from, while others allow free entry in our peer review system. It is best if you provide a mixture of general and specific keywords which reflect your research interests and the areas for which you’d like to review papers.

6)      Register your availability

In our peer review system, you can register periods of unavailability. This will let Editors know you are unable to act as a reviewer for a time and are not declining invitations.

7)      Keep your affiliation up to date

If you have recently changed institutions, please ensure that you update your account to reflect this, including your institutional email address. This helps Editors identify the most suitable reviewers and avoids any conflict of interest with the authors of the paper under review.

8)      Create a profile in Publons

Editors use a variety of different ways to search for reviewers. One way is through Publons, a free service that helps reviewers showcase their peer review contributions as well as their publications. Keeping this information up-to-date and accessible to Editors lets them know your research and expertise aligns with their journal. You can also note your interest in reviewing for a specific journal in Publons.

If you have completed all of the above and find yourself invited to review a paper, check out our Reviewer Gateway and our How to be a Peer Reviewer Webinar which provides helpful tips on the do’s and don’ts of completing a review.

Once you have reviewed for a SAGE journal, we encourage you to opt-in to receive recognition with Publons, a free service that enables you to effortlessly record, verify, and show your peer review contributions. SAGE highly values the expertise and hard work of reviewers, and the essential role that you play in maintaining the integrity and accuracy of research. Our partnership with Publons includes the integration of thousands of our journals with the service to enable you to get the recognition you deserve quickly and easily.