Interview with Dr. Alberto Porta—Winner of the Entropy Outstanding Reviewer Award
We are honored to announce that Dr. Alberto Porta has been selected as the winner of the Entropy Outstanding Reviewer Award 2025.
The following is an interview with Dr. Alberto Porta:
1. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your current research focus?
I am professor in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Milan. My current research focus is the study of cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, and cardiorespiratory regulations that play a central role in ensuring the organism’s homeostasis. Evaluation is based on spontaneous fluctuations of physiological variables recorded overtime and concurrently with noninvasive, or minimally invasive, devices. Given the complexity of regulatory mechanisms and their intricate relationships, the study of cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, and cardiorespiratory controls requires a multivariate approach based on mathematical tools and models capable of quantifying the complexity of interactions, describing closed-loop relationships, separating joint influences, excluding confounding sources, adequately considering causality, and differentiating time scales. Entropy metrics and entropy decomposition strategies have been found to be extremely useful to extract indexes capable of describing the physiology and the complexity of cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, and cardiorespiratory controls, of capturing a state of dysregulation that can lead a healthy organism towards a pathological situation, and of characterizing a pathological situation based on its severity.
2. What was your first feeling when you learned you had received the Outstanding Reviewer Award? What does this award mean to you personally?
It is a recognition of dedication as well as a responsibility for future commitments.
3. What prompted you to become a reviewer for the journal Entropy?
The main drive is the willingness to remain to date with emerging technologies for characterization of complex dynamical systems and complexity of their interactions. The academic responsibility to share my knowledge with others and maintain high-quality standards of research and dissemination of scientific information are additional important motivations.
4. In your opinion, how should a reviewer fulfill their role?
The reviewer should help the authors to improve the manuscript. The reviewer should share his/her experience on the topic, historical perspective and knowledge of the literature with the authors. Helping the authors to ensure the best perspective to their research, the maximum methodological rigor, and the greatest adherence with the scope of the journal are reviewer’s central tasks. Rejection should be the last option because rejecting the manuscript stops the dialogue, namely it does not allow the authors to reply and the reviewer to verify whether suggestions were followed.
5. How has reviewing others’ work informed or shaped your own research?
Reviewing is a way to keep me informed on the last trends in methodology and applications. The issues that are faced by the authors are like those that I encountered, or I could encounter, when processing my own data. Therefore, some good solutions and new ideas might come out. The exchange of information occurring during the revision process does not exclusively improve the manuscript but enriches the reviewer as well.
6. What role do you think peer review plays in the academic ecosystem? What is the most easily overlooked value of reviewers?
Peer review is central for the quality of data and research. The reviewers play a key role in peer review process. Specific programs should be implemented by the journals for selecting qualified reviewers and ensuring their progression within the journal. Journals should implement specific strategies to maintain qualified reviewers and attract them.
7. In your opinion, what makes a review truly constructive and valuable for authors?
A constructive review process aims at improving contribution. It should allow the authors to publish the best version of their study while reaching the widest and most appropriate audience. Therefore, indications about how to increase coherence of the organization and readability of the contribution are very important as well as suggestions about the appropriateness of the journal and matching between audience and structure of the contribution.
8. Based on your reviewing experience, what common issues do you often see in manuscripts, and what advice would you give to authors preparing their work for submission?
The most common issue is the lack of an appropriate check of manuscript consistency in “small” and/or “large”. The content of the contribution should be defensible in “small” and “large”. In “small” the layout should be precise and formatting rules closely followed. Figures must be clear and complete, and formulas should be spelled out and rigorously described. Writing should not be wordy and rich in convoluted phrases. In “large” the idea and motivation at the basis of the study must be clear, the contribution should be rigorously structured, its structure must be coherent with the main objective, and the hypotheses of the study should be evidently spelled out.
9. What advice would you offer to early career researchers who wish to become excellent reviewers in the future?
The manuscript consistency in “small” should be checked first. If the consistency of the manuscript is weak in “small”, the content might have a limited credibility because of inadequate accuracy. Then, the next step is the verification of the manuscript consistency in “large”. Hypotheses of the study, motivation and coherence of the structure with it must be present and evident. Finally, it is important to score the originality and novelty of the research compared to literature.
10. How do you see the role of reviewers evolving with advancements in artificial intelligence and automated tools in research publishing?
Artificial intelligence is a useful support but any editorial decision, including the revision process, must remain human-led and must feature a person in charge of the decision. Reviewers should not upload confidential content to artificial intelligent tools, especially because the content was not checked at that stage of the process and cannot be utilized to form any future opinion.