Get Credit Where Credit is Due as a Peer Reviewer

Author: Penny Freedman

Peer Reviewers help safeguard the quality of work being published in a journal. When you take the time to review, you are helping to uphold a journal’s academic credibility. But reviewing generally happens anonymously, making it hard for experts to prove how much they do, or which journals rely on their reviewing expertise.

Springer Nature has partnered with Publons to ensure that the work you do as a peer reviewer never goes unnoticed. Publons is a free service that seamlessly tracks, verifies and showcases your peer review activity across all of the world’s journals, without compromising reviewer anonymity. You can then use your profile as evidence of your peer review contributions and expertise in performance evaluations.

Creating a Publons profile is quick, easy, and allows you to:

• Effortlessly build a verified record of your review activity
• Compare your reviewing habits with others around the world
• Weigh in on the world’s research with post-publication reviews and discussions
• Highlight your reviewing expertise and availability to top journal editors

Over 70,000 experts already use Publons to effortlessly track their hard work reviewing over 400,000 manuscripts. When you create a profile you will be able to verify your review history across all journals without revealing the details of the reviewed manuscript. Publons also partners with ORCID so you can easily export your peer review record to your ORCID account, if you decide to do so.

As of September, those who review for one of Springer Nature’s participating journals will get the option to have a verified record of their review automatically added to their Publons profile. By default, only the name of the journal and the year of the review will be displayed, although some journal policies may allow reviewers to display more detailed information if they want to.

Reviews for non-participating journals can still be added to your record by forwarding the ‘thank you for reviewing’ emails you get from editors to reviews@publons.com.

Learn more about the Springer Nature-Publons pilot.