A New Standard in Manuscript Evaluation
A New Standard in Manuscript Evaluation
We are pleased to announce the integration of Ethical Shield into our editorial workflow — a digital platform designed to support the rigorous evaluation of submitted manuscripts from initial screening through final decision.
Ethical Shield combines rule-based automated analysis with artificial intelligence to provide editors with a comprehensive, transparent, and auditable editorial dossier for every submission. The platform does not replace human editorial judgment. Its role is to deliver structured, verifiable, and consistent information — reducing the risk of procedural error and accelerating the pre-review screening process.
Why This Matters
The volume of manuscripts submitted to academic journals continues to grow, and the pressure on editors to make timely, informed decisions has never been greater. At the same time, the scholarly community faces increasingly complex challenges: plagiarism, self-plagiarism, AI-generated peer reviews, manipulation of the review process, and non-compliance with publication ethics standards.
Ethical Shield addresses these challenges through four core principles:
Consistency. Every manuscript undergoes the same standardized checks, eliminating subjective variability at the screening stage.
Transparency. All analyses are documented and auditable, with each editorial decision accompanied by a complete action log.
Ethical Compliance. Editorial recommendations are aligned with the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Efficiency. Screening processes that previously required hours or days can now be completed in minutes, enabling editors to focus on substantive decisions.
Platform Capabilities
Ethical Shield manages the full manuscript lifecycle through five specialized analytical modules.
- Technical Check
Scans manuscripts for compliance with journal policies, including author contribution statements, funding declarations, ethics committee (IRB) approval, informed consent, conflict of interest disclosures, data availability, methodological transparency, and citation style. Each requirement is configurable as mandatory, recommended, or not applicable, based on journal-specific editorial policy. The module automatically generates a draft correspondence to authors identifying items requiring remediation.
- Submission Integrity
The most comprehensive module of the platform, performing:
- Author identity validation via the OpenAlex scholarly database
- Overlap detection for potential self-plagiarism or duplicate submissions
- Self-citation analysis mapping author citation patterns
- Bibliographic coherence checks verifying that all listed references are actually cited in the manuscript body
- Numerical consistency screening identifying contradictory quantitative claims
- Publication frequency analysis examining author publication clustering patterns
- Pre-review quality assessment applying an editorial quality rubric prior to peer review assignment
- Reviewer Finder
Automatically identifies and ranks potential reviewers based on thematic similarity to the manuscript, recency and impact of the candidate’s publications, and institutional affiliations. Candidates are presented with relevance scores, and manuscript authors are automatically excluded from the suggestion list to prevent conflicts of interest.
- Editorial Assistant
An AI-powered decision-support module that evaluates review quality by verifying whether reviews are anchored in the actual manuscript content, detects suspicious reviews (including signs of AI-generated or generic, non-specific feedback), classifies review validity (valid, usable with caution, or invalid), and recommends editorial decisions — Accept, Reject, Major Revision, Minor Revision, or Request Additional Reviewer. All recommendations are aligned with COPE guidelines.
- Revision Check
Compares the initial submission (V1) with the revised manuscript (V2) by analyzing the authors’ response letter, linking each reviewer comment to verifiable text modifications, flagging overclaims where authors assert changes not reflected in the manuscript, generating a revision heatmap visualizing modified sections, and reporting coverage metrics indicating the proportion of reviewer comments addressed with verifiable revisions.
Editorial Workflow
The platform tracks each manuscript through a structured workflow:
Submitted → Screening Complete → Pre-Review Revision (if applicable) → Sent to Reviewers → Under Review → Revision Submitted → Accepted / Rejected → Archived
Multiple revision rounds are supported, with each round documented and numbered in the editorial dossier.
Key Features
- Centralized Editorial Dossier. All manuscript-related information — analyses, reviews, correspondence, files — consolidated in a single interface.
- Complete Audit Trail. Every editorial action is logged for transparency and compliance.
- Configurable Policies. Each journal can define its own compliance requirements.
- Offline Resilience. All modules function without external AI services through deterministic analysis mechanisms.
- Reviewer Portal. Reviewers can accept or decline invitations and upload reports directly within the platform.
- Author Portal. Authors can submit revisions with response letters, with system-managed deadlines.
- OpenAlex Integration. Real-time access to the scholarly database for author verification and reviewer identification.
Our Commitment
The adoption of Ethical Shield reflects our commitment to the highest standards of scholarly integrity and editorial transparency. This platform enables us to offer authors a faster, more equitable, and more rigorous evaluation process — in full compliance with COPE principles.
Ethical Shield is an assistive tool, not a decision-making system. Every recommendation generated by the platform is subject to human editorial review and approval.