Peer reviewer identity under the microscope
Authors: Zoë Mullan
Journal: The Lancet Global Health (2021)

Peer Review Week 2021 (Sept 20–24), for which the theme is identity in peer review, gives us an opportunity to publicly name and thank the hundreds of reviewers who have dedicated time over the past 12 months to provide detailed critiques of the papers our editors screen for review. The multiple identities of our reviewers (and authors) has come rapidly into focus for us and for the other Lancet family of journals over the past 2–3 years. Where we may once only have concerned ourselves with how many papers a reviewer had published in the specialty at hand, our bespoke reviewer selection process now takes into account (at a minumum) specialty, methods experience, gender, and geographical location. In some cases we additionally seek reviewers who better represent the population under study—eg, indigenous or other ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, young people, or mental health service users. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health and The Lancet Psychiatry have made dedicated afforts in the latter two areas, respectively, with their youth advisory panel1Morgan J Our new youth advisory panel.Lancet Child Adolesc Health. 2021; 5: 613-615Summary Full Text Full Text PDF Scopus (1) Google Scholar and service user review panel.2Boyce N Marsh J Wayman C Pinfold V Kabir T Service user reviewers: extending peer review in The Lancet Psychiatry.Lancet Psychiatry. 2018; 5: 780-781Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (1) Google Scholar The perspectives these individuals bring are invaluable to our ability to discern which papers are likely to have real impact—ie, to make a difference to the lives of patients rather than to the careers or reputation of the people doing the research (or their funders). For the past 3 years we have reported annually on our commitments to achieving parity in reviewer gender and in increasing the geographical diversity of our reviewers. Between Aug 1, 2020, and July 31, 2021, 702 reviewers completed at least one review. Proportions by self-reported gender were 40% for “woman”, 57% for “man”, and 2% for “prefer not to disclose”. This represents the same proportion of women as for our previous analysis, so we clearly need to redouble our efforts if we are to reach our target of 50% women reviewers. At our cross-journal manuscript meetings, editors are now reporting the specialty, country, and gender of all reviewers in their presentations, so this should help us to hold each other to account. In terms of geographical diversity, we have made more progress. Last year, almost half of our reviewers were from the USA or UK, whereas this year the figure is 29%. A total of 79 countries were represented overall, with reviewers from India, South Africa, and Australia providing the next largest proportion of reviews (appendix). In a separate analysis by World Bank income group for the first half of 2021, we calculated that reviewers (not including statistical reviewers) were almost perfectly split between high-income and low-income and middle-income countries (figure). Thank you to all these reviewers, who can now find their contribution more prominently acknowledged on a dedicated webpage. I thank Ellie Auty and Isobel Martin for data anaysis and figure generation. I declare no competing interests. Download .pdf (.2 MB) Help with pdf files Supplementary appendix Thank you to The Lancet Global Health's clinical and statistical peer reviewers in 2021Faisal Abbas Full-Text PDF Open Access