What are Publisher-Invited Reviews?
Publisher-invited reviews are those commissioned by a journal or conference during a manuscript’s path to publication (or not). Currently, we can only process reviews of full-length manuscripts submitted to Journals, Conferences and Book series.
This includes reviews conducted post-publication if commissioned by journals/conferences. Please note that this does not include reviews of conference abstracts.
There are four simple ways to populate your review record, most of which rely on you adding and verifying any email addresses you use to submit reviews to journals.
We can then verify your reviews, which can be used in promotion and funding applications.
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Add reviews performed for partnered journals
Reviews performed for partnered journals can be instantly added to your profile as you do them.
Simply ensure that the “Automatically add reviews completed for partnered journals and funders" setting is turned on. You can do this via the ‘Peer review preferences’ tab of your profile settings.
With this setting enabled, you just need to check the box in the review submission form, and you're done! Now all reviews you do for partnered journals moving forward will be automatically added to your profile.
With participating journals and publishers, we also periodically (and securely) check for past (historic) review records. When we can match an unclaimed review with an expert, we can automatically add that review to their profile.
Note: We can only match you to reviews submitted with emails that are verified against your Web of Science Researcher Profile account. You can add email addresses via your Account Settings.
If you do not want to add reviews performed for partner journals to your profile automatically and prefer to add these manually, please follow these steps:
- Check the box on the review submission form asking if you want to add a record of the review to your Web of Science researcher profile*
- Follow the link in the confirmation email we send you
- Done - the review record will be added to your profile subject to the journal's privacy policy.
We will then send you a confirmation email to make sure we never collect review records from people who accidentally checked the box in the review submission form.
* This option appears in the peer-review submission system the journal uses, such as ScholarOne or Editorial Manager.
If you have reviewed for journals which are not partnered, you may still add verified records of those reviews to your profile.
Follow our step-by-step guide:
- Go to your inbox and try one of these common search terms:
- “Thank you for reviewing (journal name)”
- “Your review for (journal name)”
- “Review received (journal name)”
Once you have found one ‘review receipt,’ open the email and see if there is any text that is likely to be used in all emails from that journal.
For example, “Thank you for preparing a review report for…”
- Copy and paste the text into your search box to look for more review receipts.
- Forward each message you find to reviews@webofscience.com and you are done! We will verify your reviews and add them to your profile.
What counts as a valid review receipt?
A review receipt is some sort of confirmation from a journal that you have completed a review. It can be one of the following:
- Email you get from a journal after completing your peer review, either thanking you for your review or notifying you of the editor's decision. Email receipts must contain the email headers with the date it was sent to the reviewer. Unfortunately, an invitation to review or acceptance of a review assignment does not always lead to reviews being performed, thus we cannot accept these as review receipts.
- Screenshot(s) (preferably PDF) of the reviews in your journal’s peer-review submission system. Please ensure journal name, dates of reviews and your name or login are present in the screenshot.
Each review receipt must contain:
- The name of the journal you reviewed for.
- The date you completed the review (at least the month and year of review completion, if not the full date).
Please note:
- Non-English review receipts are accepted.
- Each review receipt must contain the journal name and the date of the review.
- A reviewer certificate, acknowledging a reviewer for their overall contribution to the journal does not show which reviews have been performed or on which dates they were completed; thus, we cannot process a review certificate as a review receipt to verify and add an individual review.
- You can send us more than one review receipt in the email (bulk uploads will take longer to process than individual receipts)
- We aim to process review receipts within 72 hours, but sometimes this can take longer.
Add reviews manually through the forms on the site
You can manually add a review via the Add a peer review form. You can use these forms to add unverified publisher invited reviews which will appear on your profile with the privacy settings you specify.
Finding the form:
- On the sidebar navigation click on Profile > My Records > +Add Peer Reviews
- From your My peer review records page click on “+ Add a review”
Adding a new record:
- Ensure that you have selected the “Publisher-invited review” option
- Enter the title of the journal or conference and the date you performed the review. These are required fields.
- Now you may search for publication details in the “Article” section of the form.
- Search by title or an identifier (DOI, Web of Science accession number, PubMed ID, or arXiv ID), we’ll retrieve any further details we can and give you a chance to update them to your satisfaction.
- you can then enter your review content and select your display preferences.
- Press ‘Create Review’ to finish.
You can then verify this review by forwarding the corresponding review receipt to reviews@webofscience.com with the review’s Review ID copied into the email’s body.
You will find your review’s Review ID on the review’s edit page which you will be directed to after pressing ‘Create Review.’ Simply copy that ID into the body of your email when you forward your review receipt to reviews@webofscience.com
Note: You are unable to create new journal entries. If you would like to add a review for a journal not in our database through the forms on the site, please contact us with the journal title, URL and ISSN and any other relevant information and we will add it for you.
How to add review from an interactive review process? (e.g. Frontiers)
Some journals use an interactive review process that consists of three main steps:
- Independent review
- At the start of the process all reviewers submit independent review reports. This is a traditional peer review.
- Interactive review
- Editors then activate interactive review mode where editors and authors communicate with each other.
- Final report
- Once the interactive review is finalized, it forms a “final report”.
A receipt from the interactive step of the interactive process will be unable to be processed through reviews@webofscience.com as the interactive section of the review can last over a period of time and it is difficult to ascertain the date the original review was completed, or the final review was submitted.
But don't worry, you can still add and verify your review through reviews@webofscience.com by forwarding us one of the following:
- The receipt from the independent review step.
- The receipt from the final reports step.
- A screenshot of the peer-review submission system containing your review.
Please ensure the emails include the date(s) of the independent review or final report, the journal title and some way to identify you as the reviewer.
If you do not have any of these emails you are still able to add the review manually via the Add new peer review form.