Reviewer Selection Editorial

The Editors of JGR Space Physics just published an Editorial on our reviewer selection process. The big point in this article is that we often use the Areas of Expertise, a menu of space physics topics within GEMS specific to this journal, for identifying experts within the community who might serve as qualified reviewers of a manuscript.

I wrote a month ago about our expansion of this list. We now have 18 more items in the list, bringing the total to 73. These new Areas of Expertise will only help us if members of the research community update their GEMS profile and click on whichever of the new topics falls within their specialty. Here’s the full list, with the new ones in green:

            Updating your Areas of Expertise selections in GEMS helps you as a reviewer because the Editors will be better at sending you papers within your specialty. Without this, we either have to know you very well or we have to guess a bit based on the papers that you have authored or reviewed in the past. Filling this out will hopefully cut down on the number of times we request a review from you for something outside of your comfort zone.

Also, from a communal perspective, the more people that fill out the Areas of Expertise, the higher the quality of reviews that you should have on your submitted manuscripts. With high participation of researchers selecting their Areas of Expertise, then all of the manuscripts will be better matched with specialists in that field.

Yes, filling this out means that you might get asked to review more often. But, as seen in our statistics for 2015 and for 2014, the average number of reviews per reviewer per year is ~2.5, so we are trying not to overwork you. If you feel overworked as a reviewer, then you always have the option to decline our request.

So, I encourage you read the Editorial and then log in to GEMS for JGR Space Physics and check out the new Areas of Expertise.