Every once in a while, a digital research communication tool that serves a real need and is both well designed and easy-to-use comes along. This doesn’t happen every day!

Recently, Annual Reviews introduced its authors to KUDOS, a tool that makes it simple for them to claim, explain and share their research. The service won a prestigious “Innovation in Publishing Award” in 2015 from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.
We chose this service because although a lot of energy is directed towards writing and preparing the review, somewhat less is spent on arguably the most important part of the publishing cycle, namely sharing this knowledge with others thereby increasing its reach and impact.
As one author amusingly describes it: “Invitations to write an Annual Review article typically elicit some mix of thrill, dread, pleasure, indecision, burden, intimidation, and challenge—not unlike commencing one’s PhD or undertaking a skydive.” Durham W. 1999. Preface. Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 28
Authors write reviews as a service to those in their discipline and society as a whole. Annual Reviews provides them with a concierge publishing experience. Our skilled editors are hands-on in terms of copyediting, layout and figure editing (see before and after below), resulting in compelling articles that are clearly presented for an expert and broad audience.

To ensure visibility for these high-quality reviews, we invite our authors to register with KUDOS (which takes about 30 seconds) and share their work with the world. A helpful and short video about this free service can be found here. They can then claim their review/s and are prompted to:
- Write a pithy headline
- State what the article is about
- Explain why it is important
- Add, any additional perspectives that they wish to share
Within about 15 minutes or so, Authors have created an introduction about their article (which also links to the review itself) and they can then seamlessly share it on social media from the same page. The results (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) can be viewed and there’s even a link to the ISI citation count for that article.
And the best part? Although not everyone is an Annual Reviews author, anyone can sign up for KUDOS, the service is completely free to end-users.