Science and technology have transformed industries across the world, and the academic research and scholarly publishing field is no exception.

This is especially true in India, which according to Elsevier, ranks among the top countries in scientific research, accounting for 4.4% of the world’s scholarly output, and growing at 14% compared to a 4% global average.[1]

This growth is buoyed by Dr Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister of Department of Science and Technology, who highlighted India’s focus on technology to make people more science-centric and fuel economic growth.[2] While technology by itself has made great strides in Indian research, artificial intelligence is taking this one step further.

Harnessing AI to streamline submissions

As top publishers turn to technology to streamline the publishing process, smart researchers are starting to adopt AI to improve and expedite their research journey.

With soaring rejection rates, plagiarism, ethical compliance issues, and swelling concerns around peer reviews, authors are more focused than ever on delivering publication-ready manuscripts, where the use of technology and AI can amplify the growth rate. Automatically, this has fueled a rise in the number of AI applications that aim to optimize scientific discovery and streamline the crucial publication process.

We need to use advanced AI algorithms that can instantly evaluate a manuscript across key features that most journal editors check for, including plagiarism saving precious manual time for the researcher.

The need of the hour is solutions through which authors get a report that identifies areas of improvement, and high-scoring manuscripts, that can be shared with journal editors to verify a manuscript’s submission readiness. Such tools are indispensable for anxious authors preparing to submit their research.

These tools are finding favour with Indian researchers, who are using their time during the COVID-19 lockdown to complete and deliver pending manuscripts.

This observation was supported by Taylor & Francis, who saw higher submissions of scientific and medical research papers from India in the past few months, more than from the US, and second only to China.[3]

On the other hand, a study by Nature shows that despite the rise in scholarly publications from India, these receive fewer citations on average than articles from other science-focused nations.[4]

With this lacuna in mind, we need solutions that is designed to provide every manuscript a well-written AI-powered article summary that can help authors boost the paper’s visibility, widen its reach, and drive impact. Including this summary with the submission package may also give authors an added advantage as editors can use it to quickly evaluate research manuscripts.

Apart from recommending the top three journals most suited to your manuscript, we are working with AI platform that also connects authors with journals.

We need to enable authors to ethically showcase their manuscript to multiple verified journals at the same time, receive invitations to submit directly from editors who are interested in publishing their work, and the opportunity to choose where their research is published.

When applied together, these features help authors reap maximum impact in in an age of diminishing attention spans and reducing timelines by helping them deliver a submission-ready manuscript, reduce desk rejections, and accelerate the submission process.

Our team of data scientists, product experts, and AI specialists has been working on an ecosystem – called R -  designed to equip and empower researchers to do more and be more. It has the world’s largest platform for scientific data on COVID-19, an easy-to-use research reading app that makes literature searches more effective, and the largest collection of AI tools and programs to help researchers’ do better, faster.

This growth in modern technologies is ushering in a new age in scientific research, where routine tasks are increasingly handled by AI tools, leaving researchers and publishers free to focus on new scientific discoveries.

As India powers up as a major player in academia and science, the world is keeping a keen eye on how it blends innovation and technology to help researchers save time, reduce effort, and increase quality as it ramps up its contribution to the scholarly publishing world.

Dina Mukherjee, Marketing Director- R, Cactus Communications, Mumbai

1. Huggett, L. Goodchild van Hilten - Uncovering India’s scientific strengths. Elsevier, 2016. Retrieved from https://www.elsevier.com/connect/uncovering-indias-scientific-strengths
2. Indian Science and R&D Industry Report, June 2020. Retrieved from https://www.ibef.org/industry/science-and-technology.aspx
3. Gupta - Academic publishing must change quickly in response to the pandemic. It has the means to do it. Scroll.in, June 2020. Retrieved from https://scroll.in/article/964767/academic-publishing-must-change-quickly-in-response-to-the-pandemic-it-has-the-means-to-do-it 

4. Van Noorden, India by the numbers. Nature, 2015. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/news/india-by-the-numbers-1.17519