  The peer-review process is the most widely accepted certification mechanism
for officially accepting the written results of researchers within the
scientific community. An essential component of peer-review is the
identification of competent referees to review a submitted manuscript. This
article presents an algorithm to automatically determine the most appropriate
reviewers for a manuscript by way of a co-authorship network data structure and
a relative-rank particle-swarm algorithm. This approach is novel in that it is
not limited to a pre-selected set of referees, is computationally efficient,
requires no human-intervention, and, in some instances, can automatically
identify conflict of interest situations. A useful application of this
algorithm would be to open commentary peer-review systems because it provides a
weighting for each referee with respects to their expertise in the domain of a
manuscript. The algorithm is validated using referee bid data from the 2005
Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
