Celebrating the peer reviewers of Human Fertility (2005–2022)

In previous issues of this anniversary volume, we have used the editorials to highlight the history of the journal over its first 25 years (Pacey & Leese, 2022), the many policy statements, guidelines and policy and practice articles that have been published (Pacey & Hamilton, 2022), and the many individuals who have served on the Editorial Board (Pacey & Downing, 2022). In this issue, we turn our attention to another group of individuals who often go un-noticed: the reviewers.

Like all journals which operate an anonymous peer review system, it is easy for those individuals who undertake peer review to be invisible. Indeed, in part, that is the very point of an anonymous system. However, its downside is that those many individuals who have given up many hours of their time to keep the journal running go unrecognized. In recent years, we have tried to address this by each year publishing the names of those reviewers who gave their consent to do so, but this only started in 2017 (“List of Human Fertility reviewers (June 2016–June 2017)”, 2017). However, this gives no indication of the size of the peer reviewing endeavour and the vast numbers of people involved.

Unfortunately, the journal records of its peer reviewers only go back to 2005 when Human Fertility started to use the Manuscript Central (Clarivate – ScholarOne Inc., Charlottesville, USA) system. Before then, peer reviewers were contacted directly by emails from the members of the Editorial Board and so have been lost to history. However, the statistics available from 2005 to 2022 paint a very interesting picture of peer reviewers of a small journal like Human Fertility.

Our records show that between 2005 and 2022 the journal approached 5,395 people to provide a peer review, of which only 1,790 agreed to do so (and subsequently submitted one). That is a success rate of only 33.2%! When authors sometimes complain to the journal about how long peer review appears to be taking, perhaps this statistic is worth bearing in mind. We’ve sometimes had to contact over a dozen peer reviewers before one has agreed to do so. In my opinion as Editor-in-Chief, one of the hallmarks of being a good author is also being a good peer reviewer!

Of those 1,790 individuals who agreed to be a peer reviewer of the journal between 2005 and 2022, the average number of reviews they have submitted is 3. However, there is a small core of 56 outstanding peer reviewers who have frequently gone above and beyond the call of duty having submitted over 10 reviews each. Table 1 shows the top 10 reviewers of that group.

Table 1. The top 10 peer reviewers 2005–2022.

Reviewer	Affiliation	Number of reviews
Allan Pacey	University of Sheffield	67
Matt Tomlinson	University of Nottingham	47
Ian Cooke	University of Sheffield	38
Denny Sakkas	Boston IVF	32
Val Peddie	University of Aberdeen	26
Raj Mathur	Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust	25
Marilyn Crawshaw	University of York	24
Andy Povey	University of Manchester	22
Sheena Lewis	Queens University Belfast	22
Kevin McEleny	Newcastle Fertility Centre	22

In recent years, the Human Fertility has allowed peer reviewers to have their contributions acknowledged through Publons (now part of Web of Science). We also now publish each year a list of those individuals who have reviewed for the journal in the last 12 months (if they have given their consent to do so) and this issue, we publish the list for the period 1st June 2021 to 31st May 2022 (“List of Human Fertility reviewers (1st June 2021–31st May 2022)”).

So next time you read an article in the journal, please do spare a thought for that invisible band of individuals who provided the peer review. And next time you receive an invitation to undertake a peer review, we hope you will say yes!