Having  recently agreed to moderate a panel on editorial peer review, I’ve spent some time over the past few weeks boning up on the subject.  In the course of doing so, I made a number of discoveries that have sparked a renewed interest in a subject that previously seemed roughly as exciting as ketchup on French fries.

My first discovery was the scope and extent of scholarly interest in peer review, which has spawned an extensive literature and at least one series of conferences, the International Congresses on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication.  The fifth and most recent of these was held in Chicago in September 2005, attracting 470 participants from thiry-eight countries <http://www.ama-assn.org/public/peer/peerhome.htm>.  Initially, the notion that this many people would voluntarily come together to attend a program featuring forty-two reports and fifty-three posters on editorial peer review was mind-boggling.  Whatever could be so interesting and so important about peer review?

But as I read further, it gradually dawned on me that peer review, like a lot of other seemingly routine human activities, is a far more interesting and important subject than it first appears.  For one thing, it has a lengthy history.

That history, as I learned, can be traced back to Henry Oldenburg (1619-77), the first secretary of The Royal Society of London and the first editor of The Philosophical Transactions, the world’s oldest scientific journal in continuous existence, which he founded in 1655.  Oldenburg, who founded Transactions primarily for financial reasons (with disappointing monetary results despite a print run of over 1,200 copies), found that he quickly received many submissions of dubious quality.  In response, he began calling on colleagues who were subject matter experts—he was himself a trained theologian, not a scientist—for advice on the worthiness of papers submitted for publication.  And so began peer review.

Today, of course, we think of peer review as synonymous with the scholarly journal.  But this is actually a relatively recent development, dating from the post-World War II era.  As the first modern scientific journal, Transactions may have spawned many successors, but only some adopted peer review.  Many of the new journals, possibly most, simply relied on the editor’s judgment.  For example, Albert Einstein’s revolutionary “Annus Mirabilis” papers, which appeared in the 1905 issue of Annalen der Physik, were never peer reviewed.  Instead, the journal editor in chief, Max Planck (the father of quantum theory and a Nobel Prize winner), reviewed the papers himself and then published them.

But what makes editorial peer review truly interesting today is not its history, but its current importance to the field of scholarly publishing and a growing sense of concern about its adequacy as an impartial and accurate selection tool.  Space does not permit a discussion of this fascinating controversy here, but if you’re looking for a starting place, you might consider Publication Peer Review: An Annotated Bibliography, edited by Bruce W. Speck (Greenwood, 1993).  You’ll find a helpful review in the October 1993 issue of Choice, and you can look it up in Choice Reviews Online.  That’s what I did.—IER