Peer review is younger than most people think. The usual story dates it to March 1665, when Henry Oldenburg launched Philosophical Transactions, but historians who have read the Royal Society's archive find written referee reports there only from the early 1830s, and some of the most famous journals waited until the 1960s or 1970s (Moxham & Fyfe, 2018; Baldwin, 2015).
EdCitation publishes this history of peer review, drawn from the Royal Society's pages, historians' work, the journals' own editorials and the studies that tested review, all read on 26 September 2026. Where the record is thin, we say so.
Peer review never promised that each reference was looked up. EdCitation's free Verify references does that, Find sources finds the histories and studies below, and Cite a source builds their entries from the publisher's record.
Did peer review start with Philosophical Transactions in 1665?
No. The journal began in 1665, but its editor chose what to print on his own judgement, and the Royal Society did not control it until 1752.
Oldenburg's journal, 1665 to 1677
The Royal Society's history says Oldenburg, its first Secretary, launched the journal in March 1665 and "acted as publisher and editor" (Royal Society, n.d.). Moxham and Fyfe (2018) show it was his private venture: he worked his European correspondence to find copy, seldom consulted anyone, and set out no standard for what got in. Baldwin (2017) traces the idea that Oldenburg invented peer review largely to a 1971 paper by the sociologists Harriet Zuckerman and Robert Merton.
1752: the Committee of Papers
After Oldenburg, the Society's secretaries edited the journal unofficially. In the early 1750s John Hill, a failed candidate for the fellowship, mocked the Society through old papers from the Transactions. With its editor-secretary dead and its president ill, the Society took over the journal's money and editing in January 1752 (Moxham & Fyfe, 2018).
The Council now sat as a Committee of Papers, voting by secret ballot on abstracts, officially without discussion; the journal had no editor from then until 1990. From 1752 to 1957 each issue carried a notice that the Society never gave "their opinion, as a body" on any subject, leaving the truth of a paper to its author (Moxham & Fyfe, 2018). A vote to print was not a verdict on the science.
When did referees start writing reports?
In 1831 and 1832, after two Fellows, Charles Babbage and Augustus Bozzi Granville, complained in 1830 that a committee of generalists could not judge specialist papers (Moxham & Fyfe, 2018).
Whewell and the Duke of Sussex
In 1831 William Whewell, the Cambridge polymath who coined the word "scientist", proposed that papers go to two Fellows whose signed reports would be printed in the new Proceedings (Baldwin, 2017, 2019). In November 1832 the president, the Duke of Sussex, announced that a paper would be printed only after a written report on its fitness, a system already running for almost a year. The reports survive in an unbroken run from 1832; within a year they were no longer printed, and referees reported separately and in confidence (Moxham & Fyfe, 2018).
Confidential, slow and sometimes wrong
Authors rarely saw the reports, and resentment came early: Baldwin (2017) quotes an 1845 description of the referee as "full of envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness". In 1892 Lord Rayleigh, a secretary of the Society, published a paper by John Waterston on the kinetic theory of gases that referees had rejected in 1845, admitting that a learned society "naturally hesitates" to print work of uncertain value (Moxham & Fyfe, 2018).
When did famous journals adopt peer review?
Mostly in the twentieth century: Burnham (1990) found editorial peer review general only some time after the Second World War. Each date is as its source gives it.
| Journal | What the record shows | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Philosophical Transactions | Committee of Papers from 1752; written reports from 1831 to 1832 | Moxham & Fyfe (2018) |
| Physical Review | A standard referee questionnaire from 1935; refereeing every paper official policy only in the 1960s | Baldwin (2017) |
| Science | Refereeing in house by the editorial board until the 1950s, when it agreed to send papers to outside experts | Baldwin (2019) |
| Nature | Referees for every paper from 1973, under the editor David Davies | Baldwin (2015); Nature (2025) |
| The Lancet | In 1976 its new editor, Ian Munro, feared it would not be taken seriously in the US without peer review; in 1989 it wrote that its "reviewers are advisers not decision makers" | Baldwin (2015) |
| JAMA | No date found in the journal's own pages | Burnham (1990), abstract only |
Nature's own 2025 editorial says it mandated peer review "only in 1973" (Nature, 2025). Before that, Baldwin (2015) shows, its editors printed papers unrefereed when trusted laboratory heads vouched for them, which is how Watson and Crick's DNA paper reached print in April 1953.
Did Einstein ever go through peer review?
Once, as far as the record shows. The popular version says a referee offended Einstein so much that he left Physical Review for good. The documents agree, and add what is usually left out: the referee was right.
From the journal's logbook, Kennefick (2005) gives the dates. Physical Review received Einstein and Nathan Rosen's paper arguing that gravitational waves do not exist on 1 June 1936. The editor, John Tate, sent it to the relativist Howard Percy Robertson and on 23 July returned it with his critical ten-page report. On 27 July Einstein withdrew it, writing that he had "not authorized" Tate to show it to specialists before printing. Tate would not set aside the journal's procedure.
Robertson later explained the flaw to Einstein's assistant. Einstein rewrote the paper in proof, and it appeared in the Journal of the Franklin Institute in January 1937 with its conclusion changed. Apart from a 1952 letter, he never published in Physical Review again. His two earlier papers there had never gone to a referee, so this may have been his only encounter with anonymous review (Kennefick, 2005).
Where does the term "peer review" come from?
From American grants and medicine, not journals. Baldwin (2017) finds it in the scientific press from the 1960s, first for grant committees at the National Institutes of Health, and notes that a 1973 JAMA editorial by Irvine Page listed its meanings without mentioning journals. Editors took it up over the 1970s, helped by the 1975 congressional hearings on how the National Science Foundation awarded grants.
The historians differ on the start: Moxham and Fyfe (2018) say the term was "coined only in the early 1970s", while Baldwin (2019) finds it at the National Institutes of Health by the mid-1960s. Before then, the word was refereeing.
What are single-blind, double-blind, open and post-publication review?
They differ in who knows whose name, and whether reports are published. Single-blind and double-blind are now often called single-anonymous and double-anonymous, as in our glossary.
| Model | Who knows what | An early or notable use |
|---|---|---|
| Single-blind | Reviewers know the authors, not the reverse | The Royal Society from the 1830s (Moxham & Fyfe, 2018) |
| Double-blind | Neither side knows the other | Some journals from the mid-1950s; The Historical Journal only from the late 1990s (Moxham & Fyfe, 2018) |
| Open identities | Authors are told who reviewed them | The BMJ, for all new papers, from January 1999 (Smith, 1999) |
| Published reports | Reports and replies printed with the paper | Nature, for new submissions from 16 June 2025 (Nature, 2025) |
| Post-publication | Public review, no accept or reject decision | eLife, announced October 2022 (Eisen et al., 2022) |
What the trials found about blinding and openness
The evidence is mixed. In a BMJ trial with 420 reviewers, hiding authors' names or asking reviewers to sign made no difference to how many planted weaknesses they found (Godlee et al., 1998). At a computer science conference, reviewers who could see the authors were more likely to recommend papers from famous authors, top universities and top companies, with odds multipliers of 1.63, 1.58 and 2.10 (Tomkins et al., 2017). Asking reviewers to be named did not change review quality, but 35% declined to review, against 23% of those left anonymous (van Rooyen et al., 1999). "Open" has no single meaning: Ross-Hellauer (2017) collected 122 definitions.
Does peer review catch errors, fraud and hoaxes?
Not reliably, on the published evidence. A Cochrane review of 28 studies found "little empirical evidence" that editorial peer review ensures the quality of biomedical research, though absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (Jefferson et al., 2007).
Agreement and error
Two reviewers at a clinical neuroscience journal agreed on accept, revise or reject little better than chance, a kappa of 0.08 across 179 papers (Rothwell & Martyn, 2000). Given a paper with eight planted weaknesses, BMJ reviewers commented on two on average (Godlee et al., 1998).
Stings and hoaxes
Peters and Ceci (1982) resubmitted 12 published psychology papers to their own journals under invented names and institutions. Only three were recognised; of the other nine, eight were rejected, often for "serious methodological flaws". Between January and August 2013, John Bohannon sent a deliberately flawed paper by an invented author to 304 open-access journals: by press time 157 had accepted it and 98 rejected it, and of the 106 that showed any sign of review, 70% accepted (Bohannon, 2013). Labbé and Labbé (2013) found fake papers generated by the program SCIgen in indexed conference proceedings, and in February 2014 publishers withdrew more than 120 of them (Van Noorden, 2014). See our guide to avoiding predatory journals.
Fraud reaches top journals too: Science retracted Hwang Woo Suk and colleagues' 2004 cloned embryo stem cell paper on 20 January 2006 (Kennedy, 2006).
What could not be confirmed?
- JAMA's date. Its own pages gave none; Burnham (1990) was paywalled, so we read the abstract only.
- Science's year. Baldwin (2019) says the 1950s; we found no exact year from Science itself.
- The Lancet's words. Quoted from Baldwin (2015); we could not read the 1989 editorial itself.
- Whewell's proposal. Described from Baldwin; Alex Csiszar's 2016 Nature essay was paywalled.
How do I find, cite and check the history of peer review?
Our runs of 26 September 2026 are quoted as they came back.
- Search in Find sources, across about 300 million published works. history of peer review returned 1,655,408 results, with Ray Spier's 2002 "The history of the peer-review process" first (cited by 455); Royal Society prehistory of peer review returned 3,590, with Moxham and Fyfe first.
- Open each paper to check it is the version you mean.
- Build the entry in Cite a source from its DOI.
- Check the capitals and the year against the article.
- Run the list through Verify references.
Building Moxham and Fyfe's reference
Given the DOI 10.1017/s0018246x17000334, Cite a source read Crossref's record, reported no retraction, and gave in APA 7:
Moxham, N., & Fyfe, A. (2018). The Royal society and the prehistory of peer review, 1665–1965. The Historical Journal, 61(4), 863–889. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0018246x17000334
One fix: "Royal Society" keeps its capital S. The year is that of the December 2018 issue that printed it; the article first appeared online in 2017.
Which EdCitation tools check what peer review does not?
Verify references is the best tool for a job this history never gave referees: confirming that every entry in a list is a real, published work. It looks each reference up in publishers' and registries' records and never writes one, which no chatbot can promise. BMJ reviewers found about two of eight planted weaknesses; a reference list has a claim in every line.
Three references, run on 26 September 2026
- Godlee and colleagues' 1998 trial, with its DOI, came back verified: "The DOI resolves to this record and the title matches."
- Hwang and colleagues' 2004 paper, without a DOI, came back verified and flagged: "Title, year and first author match a published record. This paper has since been retracted."
- A study we invented, "Referee agreement at the Philosophical Transactions, 1832–1890", came back not found: "No publisher's or registry's record matches this reference."
A lookup that fails is reported as could not check, never as not found.
All three tools are free with no account; Cite a source works in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 18 author-date, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver and screens each source for retraction. References from a file, part of Pro at $8 a month (pricing), checks every reference in a manuscript and matches each in-text citation to its entry. EdCitation never writes any part of a paper and cannot promise a journal will accept one; our guide to responding to peer reviewers covers what follows submission.
Quick questions
When did peer review start?
Written referee reports became routine at the Royal Society in 1831 to 1832. Philosophical Transactions began in 1665 without referees.
Did Henry Oldenburg invent peer review?
No. Historians of the Royal Society's archive found that Oldenburg chose papers himself; the legend owes much to a 1971 sociology paper.
When did Nature start using peer review?
Nature required outside referees for every research paper from 1973, when David Davies became editor, as its own 2025 editorial confirms.
Was Einstein's paper rejected by peer review?
Not exactly. In 1936 Physical Review sent Einstein and Rosen's paper to a referee and asked for a reply; Einstein withdrew it, and the referee's objection proved correct.
Does peer review check the references in a paper?
None of the histories or studies above makes that the referee's job. EdCitation's free Verify references checks each entry against publishers' records and flags retracted papers.
References
- Baldwin, M. (2015). Credibility, peer review, and Nature, 1945–1990. Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 69(3), 337–352. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2015.0029
- Baldwin, M. (2017). In referees we trust? Physics Today, 70(2), 44–49. https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3463
- Baldwin, M. (2019). Peer review. Encyclopedia of the History of Science, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.34758/7s4y-5f50
- Bohannon, J. (2013). Who's afraid of peer review? Science, 342(6154), 60–65. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.342.6154.60
- Burnham, J. C. (1990). The evolution of editorial peer review. JAMA, 263(10), 1323–1329. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1990.03440100023003
- Eisen, M. B., Akhmanova, A., Behrens, T. E., Diedrichsen, J., Harper, D. M., Iordanova, M. D., Weigel, D., & Zaidi, M. (2022). Peer review without gatekeeping. eLife, 11, Article e83889. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.83889
- Godlee, F., Gale, C. R., & Martyn, C. N. (1998). Effect on the quality of peer review of blinding reviewers and asking them to sign their reports: A randomized controlled trial. JAMA, 280(3), 237–240. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.280.3.237
- Jefferson, T., Rudin, M., Brodney Folse, S., & Davidoff, F. (2007). Editorial peer review for improving the quality of reports of biomedical studies. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, (2), Article MR000016. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.MR000016.pub3
- Kennedy, D. (2006). Editorial retraction. Science, 311(5759), 335. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1124926
- Kennefick, D. (2005). Einstein versus the Physical Review. Physics Today, 58(9), 43–48. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2117822
- Labbé, C., & Labbé, D. (2013). Duplicate and fake publications in the scientific literature: How many SCIgen papers in computer science? Scientometrics, 94(1), 379–396. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0781-y
- Moxham, N., & Fyfe, A. (2018). The Royal Society and the prehistory of peer review, 1665–1965. The Historical Journal, 61(4), 863–889. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000334
- Nature. (2025). Transparent peer review to be extended to all of Nature's research papers [Editorial]. Nature, 642(8068), 542. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-01880-9
- Peters, D. P., & Ceci, S. J. (1982). Peer-review practices of psychological journals: The fate of published articles, submitted again. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 5(2), 187–195. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00011183
- Ross-Hellauer, T. (2017). What is open peer review? A systematic review. F1000Research, 6, Article 588. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.2
- Rothwell, P. M., & Martyn, C. N. (2000). Reproducibility of peer review in clinical neuroscience: Is agreement between reviewers any greater than would be expected by chance alone? Brain, 123(9), 1964–1969. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/123.9.1964
- Royal Society. (n.d.). History of Philosophical Transactions. https://royalsociety.org/journals/publishing-activities/publishing350/history-philosophical-transactions/
- Smith, R. (1999). Opening up BMJ peer review. BMJ, 318(7175), 4–5. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.318.7175.4
- Tomkins, A., Zhang, M., & Heavlin, W. D. (2017). Reviewer bias in single- versus double-blind peer review. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(48), 12708–12713. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1707323114
- Van Noorden, R. (2014, February 24). Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2014.14763
- van Rooyen, S., Godlee, F., Evans, S., Black, N., & Smith, R. (1999). Effect of open peer review on quality of reviews and on reviewers' recommendations: A randomised trial. BMJ, 318(7175), 23–27. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.318.7175.23