Reviewer of the Year Award

The Reviewer of the Year is awarded to an individual who performed an outstanding peer review for the journal in 2020. Reviewers were offered the opportunity to nominate their own reviews and Editors given the chance to nominate reviews that they found particularly insightful. The winner and highly commended reviewers all contributed reviews of papers submitted to Thorax that went above and beyond the Editors' expectations. All of these reviews offered detailed and constructive criticism to the authors, commenting on both the strengths and weaknesses of the authors' methodology, study design, results and discussion. The reviews also gave feedback to the Editors on the novelty, readability and importance of the work, and met the criteria for a strong and perceptive review outlined on BMJ's "How to Peer Review" page.

Claire Wainwright, Deputy Editor of Thorax, said: "Sometimes reviewing a manuscript for a journal feels like a thankless chore, however the importance of high quality, thoughtful peer review cannot be overestimated. A good review helps everyone, it improves the quality of what is published and how it is published, it educates those writing the review, as well as those receiving the review at both the author and editorial level. Learning how to review a manuscript and how to write the review is also not straight forward. Professor Koumbourlis also took the opportunity to mentor a junior colleague through the review process so adding further value to an excellent review by building research capacity. My huge thanks to all our reviewers and especially to Professor Koumbourlis."

Winner:

Anastassios Koumbourlis (Children's National Hospital, USA)

Highly Commended:

Kerri Johannson (University of Calgary, Canada) and Katie Lee (University of Chicago, USA) Jennifer Whitty (University of East Anglia, UK) Charlotte Addy (Queen's University Belfast, UK) Katrina Pollock (Imperial College London, UK) Aida Venado (University of California, San Francisco, USA) Michelle Kho (McMaster University, Canada)

We are very grateful to all those who dedicate their time to review for Thorax, and each year we celebrate those reviewers on our Reviewer Thank You page. The Reviewer of the Year award is just one way of recognising outstanding individual contributions.