Peer review is the quiet engine of scholarly publishing. Reviewers read manuscripts closely, check methods and reasoning, catch errors, suggest improvements and advise editors on whether work should be published — and they do most of it unpaid, anonymously and without anything to show for it afterwards. It is among the most valuable forms of academic labour and among the least visible. A researcher who has reviewed dozens of manuscripts in a year has performed a great deal of skilled, demanding work, yet under traditional conventions almost none of it appears anywhere in their formal record. A growing set of infrastructures and practices aims to change this by treating peer review as a recognisable, even citable, research output. This article examines how, drawing on the research outputs domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.
The recognition gap
The core problem is straightforward. The reward systems of research have been organised around a narrow set of outputs — chiefly the published article — and around metrics derived from them. Peer review, despite being essential to the integrity of those very outputs, sits outside this accounting. A reviewer’s work is by design invisible: confidential, usually anonymous, and traditionally leaving no trace the individual can point to. The system thus depends utterly on review yet offers almost no incentive to do it well, or at all. As submission volumes grow and reviewer fatigue becomes a recognised concern, making review visible and creditable is now a matter not only of fairness but of sustaining the system itself.
Recording review on ORCID
One of the most practical advances is the ability to record review activity on a researcher’s ORCID record. ORCID provides each researcher with a persistent identifier and a profile that gathers their contributions, and it supports peer-review records as a type of activity that can be added. Crucially, these records can be created by trusted organisations — publishers, journals and review-recognition services — and asserted directly to a reviewer’s profile, so the recognition is verified rather than self-claimed. Importantly, this respects the confidentiality of review: a record can acknowledge that a person reviewed for a particular journal in a particular period without revealing the manuscript or the content of the review. The reviewer thus accumulates a verifiable, portable record that travels with their identifier — a tangible answer to “what review work have you done?”
DOIs for reviews
A further step is to treat the review itself as a citable object with a persistent identifier. Crossref, the scholarly registration agency best known for assigning DOIs to journal articles, supports a content type for peer reviews, meaning a review — particularly in open or published-review models — can be registered with its own DOI and metadata, linked to the article it assesses. This matters most in the context of open peer review, where reviews are published alongside the article. A review with a DOI becomes a first-class part of the scholarly record: it can be cited, linked and indexed, and its author — where they have chosen to be named — can claim it as an output. Not all review is or should be public, but where it is, a persistent identifier turns it from ephemeral correspondence into a durable, attributable contribution.
Reviewer-recognition services
Alongside these infrastructures, dedicated services have emerged to track and recognise reviewer activity. The most prominent example was Publons, which allowed researchers to build a verified profile of their review and editorial work; its functionality was subsequently folded into the Web of Science researcher profile, where reviewer recognition continues. The principle is to give reviewers a consolidated, verifiable account of their contribution across many journals — something they can cite in applications and assessments — while typically integrating with ORCID so the records propagate to the researcher’s identifier. These services demonstrated both the appetite for review recognition and the mechanics of delivering it at scale, and helped normalise the idea that review work should count.
Crediting review within the contribution record
Making review visible raises the question of how to describe it consistently as a contribution. The principle of contributorship — recording specifically who did what — extends naturally to review and editorial work. While the CRediT taxonomy was designed primarily to describe contributions to a published work by its authors, its underlying philosophy — that contribution should be named, structured and credited rather than left implicit — is exactly the philosophy now being applied to peer review. The full set of CRediT roles shows how granular and transparent contribution accounting can be, and the recognition of review work is part of the same broader movement to value every genuine contribution to research, not only those that fit the author byline. Acknowledging reviewers, recording their activity and, where appropriate, publishing and citing their reviews are all expressions of that movement.
Why it matters for the wider system
Recognising review is not only about fairness to individuals; it strengthens the whole enterprise. When review work is visible and creditable, it can be weighed in hiring, promotion and assessment, which gives researchers a reason to take it seriously and to do it well. It helps editors find and reward good reviewers. And by making the labour visible, it counters the quiet exploitation on which the system has long relied. The broader conversation about valuing diverse contributions fairly is the subject of responsible-assessment reform, and review recognition is one concrete piece of it. Making review count is part of making the contribution record honest about what research actually involves.
A consistent record of review
For review to be recognised consistently across journals, identifier systems and institutions, the way it is described must mean the same thing everywhere — what a review record is, how it links to the work reviewed, and how it is attributed without breaching confidentiality. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so that a peer-review contribution is understood identically wherever it is recorded. Peer review has always been essential; the new infrastructures simply let it finally be seen.
Leave a Reply