Thomson Reuters Collaborates with BMJ Publishing to Optimize Its Peer Review Process

-- Leading healthcare publisher alleviates reviewer fatigue with ScholarOne Reviewer Locator

PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 12, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- The IP & Science business of Thomson Reuters, the world's leading provider of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced a collaboration with British Medical Journals (BMJ), a prominent publisher of healthcare research, to optimize the efficiency of the article peer-review process and solve the industry-wide problem of reviewer fatigue by utilizing ScholarOne^TM Reviewer Locator, an extension of ScholarOne Manuscripts, the innovative peer-review and online submission program for scholarly publishers.

As part of ScholarOne Manuscripts, Reviewer Locator enables BMJ and its publishing partners to quickly and easily identify the most appropriate peer reviewers through a complex search algorithm that identifies article level meta-data in Web of Science^TM—the premier scientific search and discovery platform and the industry's authority 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 use these recommendations to supplement their already-established networks of reviewers, to find the most appropriate reviewers and avoid over-working their core reviewer pool, leading 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."

As part of ScholarOne Manuscripts's commitment to increasing the efficiency of the scholarly publishing process, Reviewer Locator helps to quickly find qualified reviewers, enabling editors to make stronger publishing decisions and develop the best possible content.

"We are pleased to collaborate with BMJ to help improve the peer review workflow," said Jasper Simons, vice president of product and marketing strategy, Publishing & Associations, Thomson Reuters. "As the world leader in management solutions for scholarly publishing, 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."  

ScholarOne Manuscripts is an innovative peer review and online submission program for scholarly publishers. It offers publishers the ability to balance the need for comprehensive information gathering with an author's desire to quickly submit an article. ScholarOne Manuscripts integrates manuscript invitation, submission, correspondence, reviewer management, reporting and user data management within one intuitive platform.

Learn more about ScholarOne Manuscripts.

BMJ Publishing
BMJ publishes high quality, high impact journals serving the medical and scientific communities, publishing across the general medical specialties, with top ranked journals, and more niche publications that cater for specialist communities. We are committed to our authors and truly believe that our journals are only as good as the articles they contain. That's why we work hard to support the authors who trust us to publish their work.

Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters is the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial and risk, legal, tax and accounting, intellectual property and science and media markets, powered by the world's most trusted news organization. For more information, go to www.thomsonreuters.com.

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