Academic Peer Review - History

History

The first recorded editorial prepublication peer-review process was at The Royal Society in 1665 by the founding editor of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg. In the 20th century, peer review became common for science funding allocations. This process appears to have developed independently from the editorial peer review.

The first peer-reviewed publication may have been the Medical Essays and Observations published by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1731. The present-day peer-review system evolved from this 18th-century process.

A professional peer-review process is found in the Ethics of the Physician written by Ishaq bin Ali al-Rahwi (854–931). His work states that a visiting physician must make duplicate notes of a patient's condition on every visit. When the patient was cured or had died, the notes of the physician were examined by a local medical council of other physicians, who would decide whether the treatment had met the required standards of medical care.

Peer review has been a touchstone of modern scientific method only since the middle of the 20th century, the only exception being medicine. Before then, its application was lax in other scientific fields. For example, Albert Einstein's revolutionary "Annus Mirabilis" papers in the 1905 issue of Annalen der Physik were not peer-reviewed by anyone other than the journal's editor-in-chief, Max Planck (the father of quantum theory), and its co-editor, Wilhelm Wien. Although clearly peers (both won Nobel prizes in physics), a formal panel of reviewers was not sought, as is done for many scientific journals today. Established authors and editors were given more latitude in their journalistic discretion, back then. In a recent editorial in Nature, it was stated that "in journals in those days, the burden of proof was generally on the opponents rather than the proponents of new ideas."