Publons Academy: Peer Review Training for Early Career Researchers

Writing peer reviews for journals is more than an academic contribution; it improves your research writing, and help you see like an editor. Early career researchers can use Publons Academy to enter the world of peer reviewers.

Image credit: https://publons.com/academy/

Publons Academy is an online training course teaching you core skills in peer review. It consists of 10 modules, covering industry knowledge, review skills and practical activities. Here is a quick look at the experience:

Module 1 to 4 are introductory topics; for example, module 2 explains the different types of peer reviews, including pre-publication reviews and post-publication reviews. From module 5 onwards, you are supposed to select a pre-print to practice writing a review following the flow of each module. At this point you are also encouraged to invite a mentor to give you feedback along the way; the mentor endorses your practice at the end of the training, which is needed for you to graduate from the course. Upon finishing the course with your mentor’s endorsement, you can then build your peer review profile on Publons.

Started as a platform for tracking peer reviews, Publons has grown its features since 2017, when it became part of the Web of Science Group. Researchers can now track their publications, citation metrics, peer reviews and journal editing work in a single profile. If you have an ORCID iD, you can login Publons and Publons Academy with ORCID; this saves you the work to create yet another user account.

Try out Publons Academy. Even if you do not intend to be a reviewer, it should be an useful experience to sharpen your skills in reading and writing academic papers.

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