An Algorithm to Determine Peer-Reviewers

The peer-review process is the most widely accepted certification mechanism for officially accepting the written results of researchers within the scientific community. An essential component of peer-review is the identification of competent referees to review a submitted manuscript. This article presents an algorithm to automatically determine the most appropriate reviewers for a manuscript by way of a co-authorship network data structure and a relative-rank particle-swarm algorithm. This approach is novel in that it is not limited to a pre-selected set of referees, is computationally efficient, requires no human-intervention, and, in some instances, can automatically identify conflict of interest situations. A useful application of this algorithm would be to open commentary peer-review systems because it provides a weighting for each referee with respects to their expertise in the domain of a manuscript. The algorithm is validated using referee bid data from the 2005 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.Comment: Rodriguez, M.A., Bollen, J., "An Algorithm to Determine Peer-Reviewers", Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, in press, ACM, LA-UR-06-2261, October 2008; ISBN:978-1-59593-991-

The Convergence of Digital-Libraries and the Peer-Review Process

Pre-print repositories have seen a significant increase in use over the past fifteen years across multiple research domains. Researchers are beginning to develop applications capable of using these repositories to assist the scientific community above and beyond the pure dissemination of information. The contribution set forth by this paper emphasizes a deconstructed publication model in which the peer-review process is mediated by an OAI-PMH peer-review service. This peer-review service uses a social-network algorithm to determine potential reviewers for a submitted manuscript and for weighting the relative influence of each participating reviewer's evaluations. This paper also suggests a set of peer-review specific metadata tags that can accompany a pre-print's existing metadata record. The combinations of these contributions provide a unique repository-centric peer-review model that fits within the widely deployed OAI-PMH framework.Comment: Journal of Information Science [in press

Improving peer review with ACORN : Ant Colony Optimization algorithm for Reviewer\u27s Network

Peer review, our current system for determining which papers to accept and which to reject by journals and conferences, has limitations that impair the quality of scientific communication. Under the current system, reviewers have only a limited amount of time to devote to evaluating papers and each paper receives an equal amount of attention regardless of how good the paper is. We propose to implement a new system for conference peer review based on ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms. In our model, each reviewer has a set of ants that goes out and finds articles. The reviewer assesses the paper that the ant brings according to the criteria specified by the conference organizers and the ant deposits pheromone that is proportional to the quality of the review. Each subsequent ant then samples the pheromones and probabilistically selects the next article based on the strength of the pheromones. We used an agent-based model to determine if an ACO-based paper selection system will direct reviewers attention to the best articles and if the average quality of papers increases with each round of reviews. We also conducted an experiment in conjunction with the 2011 UNM Computer Science Graduate Student Association conference and compared the results with our simulation. To assess the usefulness of our approach, we compared our algorithm to a greedy algorithm that always takes the best un-reviewed paper and a latent factor analysis recommender-based system. We found that the ACO-based algorithm was better than either of the greedy or recommender algorithms at directing users\u27 attention to the better papers

A Multi-Relational Network to Support the Scholarly Communication Process

The general pupose of the scholarly communication process is to support the creation and dissemination of ideas within the scientific community. At a finer granularity, there exists multiple stages which, when confronted by a member of the community, have different requirements and therefore different solutions. In order to take a researcher's idea from an initial inspiration to a community resource, the scholarly communication infrastructure may be required to 1) provide a scientist initial seed ideas; 2) form a team of well suited collaborators; 3) located the most appropriate venue to publish the formalized idea; 4) determine the most appropriate peers to review the manuscript; and 5) disseminate the end product to the most interested members of the community. Through the various delinieations of this process, the requirements of each stage are tied soley to the multi-functional resources of the community: its researchers, its journals, and its manuscritps. It is within the collection of these resources and their inherent relationships that the solutions to scholarly communication are to be found. This paper describes an associative network composed of multiple scholarly artifacts that can be used as a medium for supporting the scholarly communication process.Comment: keywords: digital libraries and scholarly communicatio