Peer review

:This article refers to the scholarly process of screening papers. For the Wikipedia process of improving articles, see .

Famous papers which were not peer-reviewed

Because of its relatively recent status as a fixture in the scientific enterprise, many of the major breakthroughs in the history of science ironically were published without having undergone peer review. However, even after peer review had become common practice, some famous papers have been published without review. These include:

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• Publication of Watson and Crick's 1951 paper on the structure of DNA in Nature. This paper was not sent out for peer review. John Maddox stated that “the Watson and Crick paper was not peer-reviewed by Nature... the paper could not have been refereed: its correctness is self-evident. No referee working in the field (Linus Pauling?) could have kept his mouth shut once he saw the structure” (Nature 426:119 (2003)). The editors accepted the paper upon receipt of a “Publish” covering letter from influential physicist William Lawrence Bragg.
• Abdus Salam's paper "Weak and electromagnetic interactions", which elucidated the unification of the weak nuclear force with the electromagnetic force into an electroweak force. It was originally published in Svartholm: Elementary Particle Theory, Proceedings Of The Nobel Symposium Held 1968 At Lerum, Sweden (Stockholm, 1968, 367–77). Salam shared the 1979 Nobel prize, along with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, for this work.