Neelima Bayyapu, a postdoctoral appointee in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory, received a Publons Peer Review Award 2018. The award honors Bayyapu’s placing in the top 1% of reviewers in computer science in 2018 who performed the most verified prepublication peer reviews on Publons for the past year.

Publons is a free service through which researchers can track, verify, and showcase their peer review contributions for peer-reviewed journals. Established in 2012, it currently has more than 200,000 registered researchers, adding more than 1 million reviews across 25,000 journals.

“Setting up a profile for Publons was simple,” Bayyapu said. ​“Now, whenever I review a paper for one of their partnered journals, I send Publons an email from the journal thanking me for the review. Publons verifies the work and keeps track of the number.”

Peer reviews — thorough reviews — take time out of one’s own research to evaluate the work of some other researcher in their field. Journals rely on such reviewers to maintain the high quality of their publications. But since the reviews are done anonymously, the reviewers typically get little recognition for their services.

“By keeping track of my reviews, Publons provides credibility that I then can include on my CV,” Bayyapu said.