Publishing Peer Review Finder
06 May 2022The Current State of PRF
In its current state, the Peer Review Finder web application contains the basic functionality users need in order to participate in the process of peer review. It allows users to peer review papers from other users that have uploaded their papers to the site and also to upload their own papers to be reviewed by other peers. When viewing the papers of other peers, users are allowed to leave a review on a paper that can then be seen by the user as well as the uploader of the paper. From there, the uploader can leave a rating on the review to rate how well the review was written. On the landing page, we also give the user access to “My Papers” and “My Reviews” which essentially shows them all of their papers that they have uploaded and all of the reviews that they have written for other peers. Peer Review Finder also allows users to view and edit their own profile.
There is also a foundation in place for a token system which prompts users to remain active on the site. It forces users to first leave reviews on papers before being able to upload their own paper for reviews, which in turn promotes the process of peer review. As we know, people like having their own papers reviewed, but they do not always like reviewing papers for others, so Peer Review Finder makes it so that users have to review papers for others before getting their own papers reviewed. As of now, tokens can be issued upon user creation and more can be gained through constructive reviews in which the ratings of those reviews will determine the number of additional tokens the user gains.
To learn more about Peer Review Finder, please visit PRF’s github.io page here.
Where to Publish PRF
Now understanding where PRF is currently at, we can then transition to figuring out how to make PRF into publishable research. The first thing to figure out in this journey would be where we are aiming to have PRF published. After researching different publication mediums, the PRF team decided that the Educational Technology & Society (ET&S) journal would be an appropriate venue to publish Peer Review Finder. Ultimately, we decided this because of the goal of the ET&S journal, which is essentially to publish research that displays meaningful educational application. PRF is designed to help fellow peers find peer reviewers for their papers. This is a meaningful educational application as it helps connect those in the field to each other by means of peer review. It allows users to find peer reviewers for their own papers and also allows them to review papers for their peers as well. It gives users a chance to learn about what others are writing about as well as a chance to put out what they have been working on, so it is a win-win situation for all parties involved. Our main targeted audience for this application is gradute students, as they are still getting into the field, so they may not have as much connections as professors or other professionals in the field, but they also have a reason to write papers for their own research. The Peer Review Finder application would allow users to take that first step into the field by helping them connect with others who are in similar situations.
How to Publish PRF
With that being said, the Peer Review Finder application, in its current state, is not yet ready to be deemed as publishable research. There are still some functionalities that we would need to add in to be able to deem it as such. As I mentioned earlier, we only have the foundation of a token system in the works, where users get rewarded for peer reviewing other papers with tokens that they can then use to upload their own papers to be reviewed. Essentially you need to review papers from others first and do a good job with those reviews in order to be eligible to have enough tokens to upload your own papers. I think this is a good start to the token system, but we can definitely add in more features to entice users more to buy into our system. We could give users tokens for other actions they partake in such as attending a conference, award tokens based on papers published in the past, and more. Although those features would also need to be added in for this to be possible, I think it could help to bring more users in. We could also allow users to build up a more public repertoire by enhancing our profile feature to include more fields, similarly to LinkedIn for example. By doing so, we could also allow users to build a network and make connections through Peer Review Finder.
With those enhancements in mind, in order to evaluate them, we would present the application to a larger group of people, specifically targeting graduate students in different fields (and perhaps even professors as their feedback would help), and have them test it out to give us feedback. We would take in any and all suggestions and ideas to improve our product and refine the product as we see fit. We could come up with a list of general tasks for the users to do, but also give them some time to just play around with and navigate through the website. By doing so, it would allow users to become familiar with the website and would let them discover features that they like and do not like about the UI specifically.