Peer-review in the Internet age

The importance of peer-review in the scientific process can not be overestimated. Yet, due to increasing pressures of research and exponentially growing number of publications the task faced by the referees becomes ever more difficult. We discuss here a few possible improvements that would enable more efficient review of the scientific literature, using the growing Internet connectivity. In particular, a practical automated model for providing the referees with references to papers that might have strong relationship with the work under review, based on general network properties of citations is proposed. ∗Electronic address: [email protected]