Join us as we engage with our Energies Exceptional Reviewer 2024, Prof. Dr. Andrea Mariscotti, to discuss his scholarly insights and journey as a reviewer for Energies (ISSN: 1996-1073).

Name: Prof. Dr. Andrea Mariscotti
Affiliation: DITEN, University of Genova, 16145 Genova, Italy
Interests: MC applied to industrial, military, and transportation systems; power quality and interference; power system modeling and analysis; electrical measurements, design, and construction of measurement setups and instrumentation; earthing, stray current, and lightning protection design

The following is an interview with Prof. Dr. Andrea Mariscotti:

1. Could you give a brief introduction of yourself to the readers?
I obtained my Ph.D. in 1996, and I have been a permanent staff member since 2005. I am currently working at the University of Genova in the electrical measurements sector. I am interested in electromobility, the design of instrumentation, electromagnetic compatibility, corrosion, stray currents, and so on, mostly applied to transportation systems. I have been a reviewer for many other journals before I was introduced to MDPI.

2. How was your experience of reviewing for Energies?
I mainly review for Energies, Sensors, Applied Sciences, and World Electric Vehicle Journal. The system works fine, is easy to use, and I can tell that there is a lot of work behind it. I also had a good experience with the editorial staff.

3. Do you have any suggestions for improving our review process?
Sometimes, some reviewers are asking for self-citations. This should be limited in order to avoid biasing the review process. All the recommended papers should be relevant to the presented work.

4. In your opinion, which research topics will be of particular interest to the research community in the coming years?
There are currently some important topics that can be used to write a significant number of papers, but sometimes, these topics peak in terms of citations and then they can become irrelevant. Some important topics are batteries and supercapacitors, with state-of-charge and state-of-health estimation problems for various applications. I also noticed that a lot of authors, especially from China, are working on stray currents and corrosion.

5. What motivated you to participate actively in the peer review process, and what do you find most rewarding about it?
This is a service I provide to my peers and, as a discussion among peers, it should be unbiased and based on equality among the participants. It is also a way I empathize with my colleagues and understand other scholars. It is a nice way to understand different perspectives, especially if my peers are from other countries and slightly different disciplines. Reviewing will also widen my perspective, and I can obtain information on research trends.

6. How do you manage your time and balance your responsibilities as a researcher and a reviewer?
Time management is pretty difficult, as there are many European and industrial projects running, plus coordinating Ph.D. students. For reviewing, I generally try to work in the first hour of the morning. Reviewing should generally be 5–10% of the total workload.

7. What advice would you give to early career researchers who are starting to participate in peer reviews?
Early career researchers should consider subjects that are important from a scientific perspective but that are also well paid, as they cannot bet on a stable career in academics. There are quite good subjects that you can manage in a small team or even alone, so there are plenty of choices depending on the personal approach to the work. An example of the latter is testing and measurement in the energy and transportation sectors, which I am currently working on.

8. How do you see the role of reviewers evolving with the advancements in artificial intelligence and automated tools in research publishing?
A scholar who is not very familiar with the English language can find a lot of help in LLMs. Besides English editing, reviewers should be very careful to detect artificial intelligence use in the presented papers. Publishing companies should also provide more than one tool to help check for AI-generated content, as the detection is often probabilistic and not unambiguous. A cause of concern can also be reviewers using AI to generate review reports, although these are easy to detect, as they generally consist of generic sentences but violate the privacy of manuscripts.