Peer review is the labour the scholarly system depends on most and rewards least. Reviewing a manuscript well takes hours of expert attention — reading carefully, checking methods, catching errors, sometimes reshaping a paper substantially — and almost all of it happens anonymously, unpaid, and unrecorded. The reviewer’s name never appears, the report is rarely seen, and the work leaves no trace on any CV. Making that contribution visible and creditable, without necessarily compromising the anonymity that protects candid review, is the problem this article is about. It sits in the credit-extensions domain and connects to the wider question of who gets credit for what, addressed through the CRediT taxonomy.
Why review is the great uncredited contribution
The invisibility of review is not an oversight; it is structural. Most review is single- or double-anonymous by design, and for good reason — anonymity lets a reviewer write a frank, critical report without fear of reprisal, particularly when assessing the work of someone more senior. But the same anonymity that protects candour also erases recognition. A researcher who reviews thirty manuscripts a year has nothing to show for it, while the system quietly assumes they will keep doing it. The result is a recognition gap that bears hardest on the early-career researchers who do a great deal of reviewing and have the most to gain from having it counted.
It is worth being clear about scope. The CRediT taxonomy deliberately covers authorship contributions to a specific paper; it has no role for the reviewers of that paper, because they are not contributors to it in the authorship sense. Recognising review is therefore an adjacent problem to CRediT rather than something CRediT itself solves — which is exactly why a dedicated vocabulary and dedicated infrastructure for reviewer recognition matter.
The shift from anonymous service to recorded activity
The key insight behind reviewer recognition is that you can record that a review happened — and credit the reviewer for it — without revealing what the review said or which way it leaned. The unit of recognition is the review activity: a verified record that a named researcher completed a review for a named venue on a given date. The content stays confidential; the contribution becomes visible. This decoupling is what makes it possible to credit review without breaking the anonymity that makes honest review possible in the first place.
ORCID review records
ORCID supports peer review as a first-class activity type on a researcher’s record. A journal or platform that integrates with ORCID can deposit a structured review record directly onto the reviewer’s ORCID profile: it states that the person performed a review for a particular organisation, at a particular time, typically without disclosing the manuscript or the verdict. Because the record is asserted by the venue rather than self-claimed, it is verified — it carries the weight of having come from the journal, not merely the reviewer’s say-so. Over time, a reviewer accumulates a trustworthy, machine-readable record of their review activity that travels with their ORCID iD into CVs, funding applications, and institutional systems.
Web of Science reviewer recognition
Web of Science reviewer recognition — the service that grew out of the platform formerly known as Publons — provides a complementary route. It lets reviewers build a verified record of their reviewing (and editorial) activity across journals, again typically capturing the fact and venue of a review rather than its confidential content, and presents it as a profile a researcher can point to. Many publishers feed verified review activity into this system automatically, and it interoperates with ORCID so that the same activity can surface on a researcher’s ORCID record. The two together — ORCID as the open, portable identity layer and Web of Science as a recognition platform that aggregates and displays activity — form the practical backbone of reviewer recognition today.
Open review and stronger forms of credit
Where a venue practises open peer review, the recognition can go further. If a reviewer chooses to sign their report, or if the report is published alongside the article (with or without the reviewer’s name), the review becomes a citable object in its own right — an output a reviewer can point to directly, not merely an activity record. This is the strongest form of review credit, because it makes not just the fact of the review but its substance part of the public record. It is optional and not appropriate for every context, but where it is used it turns review from invisible service into a visible scholarly contribution. (For the trade-offs of opening review, the distinction between signed and transparent models matters a great deal.)
Why recognition matters beyond fairness
Crediting review is not only about being fair to reviewers, though it is that. It also serves the system. A reviewer-recognition record gives editors a verifiable signal of who reviews, how much, and in what fields — useful for finding and acknowledging reliable reviewers. It gives funders and hiring committees, increasingly under responsible-assessment reforms that value contribution over output-counting, a legitimate way to see and reward an activity that crude publication metrics ignore entirely. And by making the labour visible, it makes the implicit bargain of the system explicit: review is work, work deserves recognition, and recognition can be recorded without compromising the confidentiality review depends on. The same principle that animates the credit due to authors applies to reviewers — contribution should be recorded honestly and in a form that travels.
Where shared vocabulary fits
“Peer review”, “reviewer recognition”, “review record”, “signed review”, and “review activity” are recorded inconsistently across journals and platforms, which is exactly how review contributions get lost or double-counted. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these terms precisely — and points back to ORCID’s peer-review schema and the recognised reviewer-recognition platforms — is what lets a review credited in one system be understood in another. Supplying that definitional layer is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play; the relevant terms sit in the credit-extensions domain.