Aries Systems Corporation

Analytics, the systematic analysis of data and statistics to discover meaningful patterns, is essential for how businesses define and achieve success. Leveraging analytics can have a huge impact on publishers and their bottom line including optimized operations, increased revenue, reduced costs, improve quality of published works, enhanced experience for stakeholders, and greater competitive advantage. Most publishers are already tracking and using basic data as fundamental building blocks to their strategy, but are they getting the full picture? There are many reasons why publisher strategies may not reach their full potential. Their data collection may be limited in scope with other areas of analytics that are untapped or unexplored, have teams that lack expertise/training in analytics, have little to no access to advanced data analysis technologies, or underestimate the value of investing in analytics altogether.

How can publishers and societies start to bridge this gap? By harnessing the data related to their editorial and production systems, journals will be empowered to help identify trends of both strong and weak points across various areas of business to enable targeted, data-driven improvements. This includes assessing the performance of the journal (both internal teams and its published works), the engagement of users, and the effectiveness of workflows, communications, and resources. At a higher level, publishers can leverage analytics from their submission sites to support strategic initiatives such as exploring new marketings, advancing their DEIA priorities, refining or expanding their scope, and more. Aries Systems offers several integrated reporting solutions in Editorial Manager® (EM) and ProduXion Manager® (PM) to help boost analytical strategies.

All EM and PM sites come equipped with a set of standard and custom reporting capabilities within the Main Reporting Menu and the Enterprise Analytics Reporting (EAR) suite. For publishers with larger portfolios, Aries also offers cross-publication reporting (X-EAR) capabilities to track data across some or all sister journals on EM/PM. All the functions of single-publication EAR can be used to run reports in XEAR against a unified database called the URSDB, which also enables other cross-publication functions such as duplicate submission check, Reviewer statistics sharing, and Author invitation statistics sharing. To gain even greater insights, publishers can capture key data against their EM and PM sites through third-party analytical services such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. With these advanced technologies, journals can track user behavior data as they interact with their EM/PM sites, such as page views, viewer duration, navigation behavior, clicks and conversions, visitor geographic origin, visitor source, and much more! Data is collected and monitored in real-time, pulled against any specific time frame, and displayed in interactive dashboards that automatically analyze trends.

But with so much data, it can be daunting to get started. To help publishers that are newer to tracking advanced analytics across EM/PM, we recommend these focus areas as a starting point and consider what actions the data prompts them to take:

• EM Home page and Navigation Bar: How many daily users visit this page? Do users complete any calls-to-action (CTAs)? How often do users leave and return? Do users click on any linked resources on the page or in the NavBar? If so, are those the right resources or do they need to be updated? What countries are users based from? What source led them to our EM site? Where else in the system can successful resources be linked or embedded?

• Author submission and Reviewer submission pages: How many users abandon the submission process before it’s complete? Which pages/forms take up the most time? Where do they appear to be getting stuck? Are the custom instructions clear? Where can the process be streamlined? What are the assignment turnaround times? What fields are being skipped and which required fields are actually yielding helpful input?

• Registration and Login pages: How long do users spend on this page before being navigated to their roles’ Main Menu? Do they often click to reset their login credentials? Do users attempt to log in before registering? Are the right fields on the registration forms and are they set to required accordingly? Are the custom instructions clear? Do users understand which role to register/login as? How many users click to use the ORCID single sign-on (SSO) feature?

• Letters: How many letters are sent daily and to who? Are the letter recipients completing the requested actions from the letter? Are merge fields being used effectively? Are inserted deep-links being clicked on, and does it appear to streamline the workflow? Can the content be more concise or the language more refined to better suit the audience? Can letters be sent in batch or set to automated scheduled to save Editors time? How can engagement from letters be improved for Authors, Reviewers, and Editors? Should helpful resources be linked in letters?

Additional areas can include technical checks, Editor decision forms, production task workflows, and more! From the Main Reporting Menu in EM/PM, publishers can leverage the standard Journal Accountability Report (JAR) to catch a detailed snapshot of activity and performance. The JAR can run against a single or multiple datasets at once, and results can be further filtered and refined. Popular reports through the JAR include submission and revision statistics, turnaround times for technical checks and Editor assignments, Reviewer invitation and performance, correspondence history, and more!

Aries Systems is pleased to partner with publishers to harness the right integrated analytical solutions to help journals work smarter through a strong, informed strategy. Once publishers create and account with Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, they must generate and provide a unique tag to their Aries Account Coordinator (AC) to configure on specific pages. For support with EAR/XEAR, contact your Aries AC.