Prophy: An automated reviewer finder to improve the efficiency, diversity and quality of reviews

Abstract

Peer review is under pressure. Without fair, transparent and efficient peer review we cannot ensure the right proposals get funded and the correct manuscripts get published. In the era of Open Access, which is driving an exponential increase in the number of submitted publications, how we carry out peer review is becoming increasingly important and how we find reviewers is coming under scrutiny. The current methods are slow and produce bias pools of reviewers. As such we need an improved way. At Prophy we have developed a state-of-the-art referee finder that can find experts to review any manuscript from any scientific field in seconds. Then through post-processing filters we can find appropriate candidate referees who are most likely to review a paper, whilst highlighting important conflicts of interest through our complex citation networks. These methods can ensure fair and independent experts who can review interdisciplinary papers from any discipline. These methods are being delivered through APIs and the editorial workflow of editors ensure the right people get access to these tools. Finally, as large-language models improve, so does Prophy and as such we will be looking to drive real innovation in this area in years to come.