Peer2ref: A new online tool for locating peer reviewers by Jack Cochrane.
From the post:
“Findings published in the peer reviewed journal BioData Mining…” A sentence like this instantly adds credibility to a scientific article. But it isn’t simply the name of a prestigious journal that assures readers of an article’s validity; it’s the knowledge that the research has been peer reviewed.
Peer review, the process by which scientists critically evaluate their colleagues’ methods and findings, has been essential to scientific discourse for centuries. In those early days of scientific research, with fewer journals and lower levels of specialization, scientists found it relatively easy to devote their time to assessing new findings. However as the pace of research has expanded, so too has the number of articles and the number of journals set up to publish them. Scientists, already faced with increasingly full to-do-lists, have struggled to keep up.
Exacerbating this problem is the specialization of many articles, which now come from increasingly narrow fields of research. This expansion of the body of scientific knowledge and the resulting compartmentalization of many research fields means that locating qualified peer reviewers can be a major challenge.
Jack points to software developed by Miguel A Andrade-Navarro et al that can help solve the finding peer reviewers problem.
From his description of the software:
This allows users to search for authors and editors in specific fields using keywords related to the subject an article, making Peer2ref highly effective at finding experts in narrow fields of research.
Does “narrow field of research” sound appropriate for a focused topic map effort?
Identifying the experts in an area would be a good first step.
I first saw this in Christophe Lalanne’s A bag of tweets / September 2012