Peer review

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

History of peer review

Peer review has been a touchstone of modern scientific method apparently only since in the middle of the twentieth century.http://www.designinference.com/documents/05.02.resp_to_wein.htm Before then, its application was lax. For example, Albert Einstein's revolutionary "Annus Mirabilis" papers in the 1905 issue of Annalen der Physik were not peer-reviewed. The journal's editor in chief (and father of quantum theory), Max Planck, recognized the virtue of publishing such outlandish ideas and simply had the papers published; none of the papers were sent to reviewers. The decision to publish was made exclusively by either the editor in chief, or the co-editor Wilhelm Wien—both certainly ‘peers’ (who were later to win the Nobel prize in physics), but this does not meet the definition of "peer review" as it is currently understood. At the time there was a policy that allowed authors much latitude after their first publication. 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."

Related Topics:
1905 - Annalen der Physik - Max Planck - Wilhelm Wien - Nobel prize - Physics

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