Aries Systems and SciScore Partner to Enable Enhanced Rigor and Reproducibility within Editorial Manager

Aries Systems Corporation, a leading technology workflow solutions supplier to the scholarly publishing community, is pleased to announce its partnership with SciScore™. Aries and SciScore have partnered to integrate Editorial Manager® (EM), a cloud-based manuscript submission and peer review system for scholarly journals, reference works, books and other publications, with SciScore, the leading methods review tool for scientific articles.

A poorly controlled study impacts the quality of scientific research. It is critical for those in the peer review process to adhere to rigor and transparency criteria to ensure their contributions support the reproducibility of scientific research. Focusing on these methods, SciScore detects whether authors  address bias, sample size, sex, blinding, the randomization of subjects, and properly identified key biological resources (i.e., research reagents) within an Author’s manuscript, producing a score that roughly corresponds to the number of criteria filled compared to the number that was expected.

Prior to the integration with Editorial Manager, Authors would need to send key manuscript metadata into SciScore to have their content evaluated. Now, Editorial Manager can send this content to SciScore automatically on the Author’s or journal’s behalf. SciScore then scans the manuscript’s methods section(s) and sentences that contain research resources to generate a reproducibility score, reports and resource tables. SciScore’s evaluation will be made available within Editorial Manager, providing Authors, Editors and Reviewers with easy access to the data. The integration enables a more efficient and seamless manuscript analysis workflow as Editorial Manager users can complete the entire process without ever needing to leave the system. Publications utilizing Editorial Manager now have another tool at their disposal designed to improve the quality of their scientific papers and research.

Aries Director of Product Management Tony Alves stated, “Transparency and rigor adherence are critical to the reproducibility of scientific research. SciScore is a fantastic methods review tool that helps researchers quickly, accurately, and securely score their research for rigor and transparency adherence.  Authors, Editors and Reviewers have expressed a desire to have their SciScore reports and tables centralized within Editorial Manager for some time. We are always looking for ways to innovate and enhance our EM users’ experience and feel that this integration will bring a lot of value. Publications who are members of Editorial Manager will individually subscribe to SciScore services and I am really pleased to be able to offer this integration!”

SciScore CEO Anita Bandrowski said, “SciScore is a first of its kind editorial tool addressing a part of the manuscript that reviewers do not want to read, the methods section. The tool does not get bored reading a long list of reagents and verifying whether the information about each one is accurate. It flags problem reagents, a much smaller set that reviewers can ask about. The tool produces a simple report flagging multiple issues that typically take editors a longer time to verify.”

The SciScore and Editorial Manager integration will become available with the release of Editorial Manager/ProduXion Manager version 17.0.