"involved a total of" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to the number of items or people involved in an event or situation. For example: "The project involved a total of 10 members from the community."
The experiment involved a total of 180 pigs of 20 litters.
For the paper, researchers scrutinized findings from 45 studies that involved a total of nearly three million people.
The nine studies involved a total of 430,000 participants of which 1,990 had cirrhosis.
The assessment of reactor vessel integrity (ARVI) project involved a total of nine organizations from Europe and USA.
Collectively, the 42 studies involved a total of 172 participants who received intervention from a total of 396 trained peers.
(This experiment involved a total of nine zebrafish larvae, and subsequent analyses revealed that each larva contained about 5 neurons expressing Magneto).
It is just one of the dozens of case studies in the new report, which involved a total of 108 deaths.
We investigated this question in five studies (in press at the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General), which involved a total of 2,726 U.S. American participants.
The included studies involved a total of 129 people with chronic pain (fibromyalgia syndrome, spinal pain, hand pain, irritable bowel syndrome), and 104 healthy control participants.
Two experiments were carried out in a between-groups methodological design that involved a total of 111 participants who completed a simulated shopping trip.
The participants in this study involved a total of 193 students taking Statistics as a core subject in the matriculation program of a private higher learning institution.
