New in Signals: enhanced author publication history checks

With an increasing number of submissions, editorial teams regularly evaluate manuscripts from researchers they don’t know. Checking an author’s publication history can be important for establishing trust, but doing it thoroughly is hugely time-consuming — information is spread across multiple sources, and even then it’s difficult to disambiguate authors with similar names. Automated tools exist, but often come with high false positive rates.

We’re pleased to announce the enhanced publication history signal in Signals Manuscript Checks. By searching deeper into author histories through the Signals Data Graph, we now surface significantly more potentially problematic prior works — without the manual effort.

The problem with false positives

False positives are the big problem with typical publication history checks. Frequent false positives mean editorial teams don’t trust a flag and end up checking it manually anyway — spending significant effort validating concerns that turn out to be nothing.

Until now, Signals kept false positives low by surfacing problematic articles that sat very close to the manuscript’s authors in the citation network — this delivered high precision but limited recall.

What’s New

The enhanced publication history signal now widens the search significantly, comprehensively identifying problematic prior works, including:

• Retractions, with the reason shown so editors can quickly assess relevance
• Articles flagged by the Problematic Paper Screener

If an author has problematic articles in their history, editors get the signal directly in the manuscript report — and can dig into further details of the prior works.

3 Authors are flagged with author history signal in Signals’ manuscript report page

Broader checks, fewer false positives

Going broader usually means more noise. Since the soft launch, feedback from customers has helped us to iterate and make significant progress in reducing false positives — giving editors and research integrity teams a reliable way to quickly filter and triage articles with risky author provenance.

Further information of an author’s potentially problematic publications in Signals’ manuscript report page

The enhanced publication history signal is available now to all publishers using Signals Manuscript Checks via ScholarOne, Editorial Manager, eJP, bespoke integrations, and Direct Upload.

Book a demo to see how Signals can help your editorial teams make faster, more confident decisions about unfamiliar authors.