Editors will be excited to hear that the New Year brings with it a major and most-requested improvement to EES—reference linking—the seamless click through access to abstracts of cited articles. And that’s not all! Within a couple of months, EES will be further expanded to integrate both Scopus and ScienceDirect, enabling editors and reviewers to click through to the full text of cited articles. Elsevier explains the new functionality and the benefits for editors, reviewers and authors.

Philippe Terheggen, Director Journal Development & Support, S&T Journal Publishing: “Elsevier is extremely committed to supporting editors and the peer-review process. One request we’ve heard repeatedly during meetings, focus groups and conferences with editors, and also from the one million or so reviewers we support, is for the automatic click through from manuscripts to referenced texts. We’ve seen that the difficulty in accessing references is a ‘pain point’ for both editors and reviewers in the peer-review process so we’ve invested time and considerable expense enabling this function within EES, the editorial workbench.”

Two-clicks
In just two clicks you are taken from the manuscript to the referenced article. Like any significantly advanced technology, it seems to work by magic. Franka Hendriks, the Project Manager driving this development over the past two years, walks us through the workflow. “The way it works is that authors submit manuscripts to us and we use automated software to extract the reference information and find the correct records,” she explains. “What the editor or reviewer will see are hyperlinks to CrossRef (and Scopus as of March) in a result table in EES.”

For Elsevier articles, the editor/reviewer is passed on to ScienceDirect. If the person is a ScienceDirect guest user, or does not have a ScienceDirect subscription, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) system brings the EES user to the abstract. With a journal subscription in ScienceDirect, the abstract, full text and even the article’s references can be viewed.

Hendriks goes on to explain, “When the editor sends the manuscript for peer review, the reviewer is instantly able to use the hyperlinks to directly access the cited article—thanks to 30-day access to Scopus (integrated in EES) that can be quickly activated by the reviewer. A reward for the reviewers,” Hendriks points out. “While editors, linking directly from EES, are soon to have unlimited access to Scopus and ScienceDirect.”

Quick and easy
The simplicity is one of the many things that enthused the editors and reviewers who took part in the pilot project. But there are also quite a number of other benefits that excited them. “Unlike other publishers, we don’t require the author or editor to use a special tool or program to insert hyperlinks,” explains Hendriks. “And editors don’t need to enter different usernames and passwords—once they’re logged in as an editor in EES there’s a seamless link through to the other platforms. Furthermore, not only will editors and reviewers be able to see the links in EES, links will also be available in the PDF version of the manuscript. So if you’ve saved the manuscript to your desktop, you’ll still have the links available to you,” she says.

While all this is very satisfying, it’s the enhancement to the peer-review process that has everyone really smiling. Terheggen says, “Editors and reviewers will have quick access to the abstracts of the manuscript’s references. They will be able to check the scientific merit and identify missing or incorrect references. We’re hoping that seamless access to references will reduce the time a reviewer needs to spend on the review. We understand that we’re asking reviewers to contribute valuable time as well as their expertise and are striving to make the review process more enjoyable and more efficient.”

More reference links
To let editors and reviewers take advantage of this enhancement as soon as possible, reference linking will be rolled out with CrossRef links in January. CrossRef links will then be replaced with Scopus in March. "The Scopus abstract database offers much more content than CrossRef, enabling us to provide more reference links" Hendriks says, "In addition, reviewers can also benefit from tools to retrieve citation counts (that help the reviewer evaluate the reference), up-to-date email addresses for authors and, as of March, seamless integration with ScienceDirect to view the full-text."

After replacing CrossRef links with Scopus links in March, the plan is to provide links to full texts in ScienceDirect, also by March. Once this is done, Terheggen, Hendriks and their team will continue to look for more ways to deepen the integration of the editorial process. Already they have plans for EES to be able to send an alert to the reviewer when the article they reviewed is published, give access to the published text and then report the citation data to the reviewer. Now if only they’d figure out a way for EES to make the coffee too!
 

To cite this article, please use: Kirsten Spry, "EES provides the missing link", Elsevier Editors' Update, Issue 21, February 2008

Please send responses to: EditorsUpdate@elsevier.com