Edit: arxangel.net has been shut down for the time being. Many thanks to everyone who helped out with advice and feedback. I was thrilled to see arxangel being used regularly by a global audience, but sadly it was never enough to make it sustainable long-term.
If you are editing a journal and your journal has a lot of overlap with ArXiv, then ArXangel.net can offer a few useful services.
Finding new content
It’s common practice for editors to search ArXiv for new preprints that fit their journal. If a preprint looks interesting, then the editor might invite the authors to submit the preprint to their journal.
With ArXangel, you no longer have to perform that search manually. ArXangel can show you suitable preprints for your journal in a feed.
E.g. Here is the feed for a journal called Neurocomputing https://arxangel.net/journal_feed/?journal_name=Neurocomputing
This list shows articles which are similar to articles published in Neurocomputing in the past.
This works with any journal that has more than a few recent articles in ArXiv.
It might be, though, that an editor wants to branch out into new content. An easy way to do this is to find a competing journal that is already publishing that content and take a look at their feed. You might find some of the best new research before your competitor ever sees it.
Note that journals with very few papers in ArXiv will not have extensive lists of new suitable articles, so if you are running a very small journal, looking at competitor journal feeds might be the easiest way to go.
Finding referees
Let’s imagine that you have a new submission to your journal.
ArXangel offers a simple article-similarity lookup. You can use this to find the authors of similar articles to one submitted to your journal — the assumption being that those authors should be suitable referees for your article.
Simply paste the abstract into the articles route (or paste the arXiv ID if you have it).
- Here’s an example which I just picked from the top of the q-bio category of ArXiv. https://arxangel.net/articles/?arxiv_id=2007.15642
At the moment, ArXangel doesn’t share referees’ email addresses. However, if you need to find a referee’s email address, simply click on one of their example preprints and open the pdf. Authors often choose to share their email address somewhere on the pdf.
Feedback
I hope that ArXangel is useful to you. I have a few ideas that I still want to try out with the service, but I’d rather focus on things that help other people with their work. So, do let me know if you have any questions, comments or ideas for things that you’d like to see on the site. If you don’t tell me, I won’t know! :)
You can reach me in the comments below, or find me on Twitter.
