Thank you to our high-quality peer reviewers

Abstract

It's Peer Review Week again, and this year the focus is on quality in peer review. This theme goes to the heart of peer review and its role in setting scholarly publishing apart from other forms of information dissemination. Peer review cannot perform its role in improving the clarity and robustness of written research works or in challenging the publication of those that are poorly designed or interpreted unless the reports generated by reviewers are thorough, considered, specific, dispassionate, and generated in the spirit of moving science forward. At The Lancet Global Health, we are indebted to our many dedicated peer reviewers who generate sometimes multiple high-quality reviews for us every year. Approaches vary of course, and we recognise that not all our reviewers will have had the same degree of mentoring in what constitutes a useful review. We were pleased, therefore, to have been involved with Elsevier Researcher Academy's certified peer reviewer course, which goes live this week. The course is free of charge and can be studied via self-directed learning at the user's own pace. We hope it will be useful in enhancing the skills and confidence of those interested in contributing to peer review, particularly in settings where access to such resources is limited. Finally, a word on diversity. Last year we revealed that only 36% of our reviewers were women and pledged to invite at least 50% women per paper over the next year. Despite a real effort to do so, only 249 (38%) of the 662 reviewers who submitted a review between September 2018 and August 2019 and whose gender we could identify were women. We will continue with our commitment and welcome ideas for how we can improve further. Thank you to all who reviewed over the past 12 months (appendix). I thank Rebecca Barksby for data analysis. Download .pdf (.29 MB) Help with pdf files Supplementary appendix