Elsevier announced today the launch of reference linking, a new service enabling its community of reviewers to have direct access to referenced articles published by Elsevier, directly from the manuscript they are reviewing.
Reference linking means that by clicking on the hyperlinks, listed alongside the referenced articles, reviewers are brought to the abstracts of those articles. Furthermore, depending on the reviewer’s personal or their institute’s subscription entitlements, reviewers can also link directly, via CrossRef's DOI service, through to the articles referenced in other publishers’ journals. This functionality and the facilitating tools are integrated, seamless and accessible through Elsevier’s submission and peer review editorial system (EES).
Elsevier’s network of 7,000 journal editors and 500,000 reviewers using EES will have access to abstracts in Scopus (www.scopus.com) and full text of referenced articles in ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com). As well as having access, they also benefit from the functionality of these systems, such as searching for related articles, author and citation information. Reference linking will benefit reviewers by reducing the time spent searching for relevant information during the review process, ensuring a more accurate review process.
“Committed to supporting the peer review process, we are the first major publisher to have integrated its systems and provide reviewers free access to full-text articles. This development will not change the submission process, it will just improve it,” said Philippe Terheggen, Senior Vice President, Science & Technology Journals, Elsevier. “Authors are not required to do anything additional or use particular systems or applications to ensure that the references in their manuscript are linked, this will happen automatically. To date reference linking has been introduced to almost all of our journals.”
“We already embedded Scopus in our submission and peer review editorial system, EES, two years ago,” commented Martin Tanke, Managing Director Science & Technology Journals, Elsevier. “Adding to the integration of services and tools with full-text access and bibliographic information is a significant next step in our commitment to support the research community in the fundamentally important task of peer review. We will continue to develop workflow solutions and services that support scientists and their research; and add value to the publishing process.”