The Lancet Regional Health – Europe has thanked 1,305 clinical and statistical reviewers who evaluated submissions for the journal in 2025. Its short editorial acknowledgment describes peer review as work that depends on researchers giving time and judgment while also carrying their own research, clinical and teaching responsibilities.
The reported pool grew from 1,192 reviewers in 2024 and 917 in 2023. That is 113 more reviewers in one year and 388 more across two years, equivalent to growth of about 9.5% and 42.3%, respectively. The journal linked the increase to the rising volume and breadth of submissions and to continued participation from the research community.
The numbers document participation, not the quality of individual reviews. The 2025 article is an acknowledgment followed by a reviewer list. It does not report acceptance rates, review times, scoring consistency, corrections prevented or the effect of reviewer comments on published papers.
A Larger Pool Can Spread a Demanding Workload
Peer review asks specialists to examine methods, interpretation and reporting before an editor decides what to publish. The journal's acknowledgment stresses that this labor is often invisible and is performed alongside reviewers' primary jobs. A larger pool can give editors more people to approach as submission topics expand.
Headcount alone, however, cannot show how evenly that work was distributed. The article does not say how many invitations each person received, how many reports each completed or whether some fields remained difficult to staff. It also does not distinguish a brief consultation from a full manuscript review.
The strongest supported conclusion is therefore narrow: more people reviewed for this journal in 2025 than in either of the previous two years. Claims that the increase prevented a collapse in research standards or defeated fraud would require evidence that the acknowledgment does not contain.
The 2024 Report Supplies Context, Not a 2025 Update
A separate journal editorial about 2024 provides the most recent demographic detail in the cited material. It said 56.7% of reviewers identified as men, 34.6% as women, 0.8% as non-binary or gender diverse and 8.0% did not disclose a gender identity.
That report also said 93.2% of reviewers were from high-income countries, 5.5% from low- and middle-income countries and 1.3% had no country information available. Reviewers came from 55 countries, with the largest reported groups based in the United Kingdom, United States, Italy and Germany.
Those figures should not be silently carried forward. The 2025 acknowledgment does not publish an equivalent breakdown, so it cannot establish whether gender or geographic representation improved, worsened or stayed the same. Growth in the total pool and change in its composition are different questions.
A Thank-You Note Is Not an Audit
The 2024 editorial said the journal was trying to broaden reviewer diversity and noted that Lancet journals added voluntary equity, diversity and inclusion classifications to their submission portal in September 2024. It presented that change as a tool expected to help reviewer searches, not as proof that representation had already become balanced.
Neither editorial is a research study of peer-review effectiveness. Both are written by journal editors about their own process, and the supplied figures are not accompanied by an independent audit in the articles. That does not make the totals meaningless, but it limits what responsible reporting can infer from them.
The source package stays entirely within reviewer recognition and reported counts. It cannot support a wider account of threats to global medical research. Keeping the story inside that boundary is necessary if the acknowledgment is to remain evidence rather than a launch point for speculation.
Recognition Does Not Replace Transparency
Publishing the reviewer list recognizes labor that journals depend on, but gratitude is not a performance measure. Readers still need separate evidence to judge whether review was timely, methodologically demanding, diverse and capable of catching consequential errors.
The useful signal is the scale of participation: 1,305 people contributed in 2025, and the pool was more than 40% larger than in 2023. The unresolved questions concern workload, outcomes and representation. The journal's own numbers make the growth visible; its omissions prevent that growth from being sold as proof that the system is secure.