History of Peer Review
Peer review has become a bedrock institution in science and academia. It is normal for a paper or publication that has not undergone this process to be viewed skeptically at best within its expert community. Therefore it should come as no surprise that peer review has its earliest roots in the dawn of the modern scientific era, with examples of the process dating to the 17th Century.
Other People Are Reading
-
Identification
-
Peer review is a procedure in which the work of a scholar or scientist is subject to examination by other experts from the same field (the "peers" or "referees" ). A proper peer review procedure will draw on a group of such experts and make the examination anonymous--neither the author of the work nor the reviewers will know who is involved--but there is no standard rule regarding peer reviewing. Nowadays, this is commonly done for studies, articles and grant proposals.
History
-
The first example of peer review on record is when Henry Oldenberg, founder and editor of The Royal Society (a British scientific institution) instituted it for the journal "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society" in 1665. This journal is the oldest scientific publication in the English-speaking world. It is more common to date the practice to 1731 and "Medical Essays and Observations," a publication of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, however. The process used by the Royal Society of Edinburgh bears more resemblance to the commonly understood (albeit loose) standards of peer review. Peer review gradually become a standard feature of medical science but did not penetrate widely into science and academics until the 20th Century, becoming a regular institution by the middle of the century.
-
Significance
-
From a historical point of view, it is not surprising that peer review first took root in medicine. Unlike physics, where the consequences of quackery are generally not harmful, legitimate medical doctors and researchers have a corporate interest in screening new ideas for fraudulent claims and poor research. The advantages of a tool like peer review for a corporate body to self-police are manifest, and explain the gradual adoption of this procedure in both science and academia.
Function
-
Modern peer review will involve an editor sending a manuscript to between two and four authorities on a given subject, either directly by email or through an Internet-based manuscript platform. The peers (or "referees") will read and comment on the document. They will also make a recommendation to accept the article, accept with revisions, reject for substantial revision, or reject outright. While the editor is usually not expert enough to be a participant in the peer review, he will usually know enough to evaluate all of the comments and requests for revision that are sent back and decide which to forward to the author. (In scientific journals, all comments are sent back without filtering as a matter of standard practice.)
Considerations
-
As previously noted, peer review does have its problems, namely its often-ignored role in suppressing valid and innovative concepts. Richard Horton of the British medical journal "The Lancet" once famously declared that peer review was "biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish and frequently wrong."
-
More Like This
Comments
-
obscurechemist
Jan 03, 2011
"neither the author of the work nor the reviewers will know who is involved" - This statement is simply not true. In modern biomedical research, the reviewers ALWAYS know the names of the authors, and the authors NEVER know the names of the reviewers. Just sayin'. -
faro0485
Apr 26, 2009
The first documented description of a peer review process is found in the Ethics of the Physician written by Ishaq bin Ali al-Rahwi (854931) of al-Raha, Syria, who describes the first medical peer review process. His work, as well as later Arabic medical manuals, state that a visiting physician must always 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 review the practising physician's notes to decide whether his/her performance have met the required standards of medical care. If their reviews were negative, the practicing physician could face a lawsuit from a maltreated patient.Ray Spier (2002), "The history of the peer-review process", Trends in Biotechnology 20 (8), p. 357-358 [357].
