Peer Review

Peer review, sometimes also known as “refereeing,” is a process of evaluating scholarly work by others who are experts in the same field to maintain or enhance the work's quality. Peer review is used to legitimate publication of scientific and technical papers and to make funding decisions on proposals. The judgments of reviewers help editors or funding groups determine whether work submitted to a journal, press, committee, foundation, or government agency is published or funded, as well as what items most merit presentation at academic conferences.

The goal of peer review is to ensure that scholarly work submitted for publication, evaluation, or funding is judged on its merits, not solely on the reputation or the institutional affiliation of its authors. As Bruce Thyer explains, having experts in an appropriate field read and evaluate manuscripts prior to their publication increases the quality of published work over the long run. Indeed, some argue that peer review is the principal process that allows all scholarship, particularly science, to progress, for it creates the conditions where only the best work is widely shared.

According to Eleanor Chelimsky, the first recorded use of peer review occurred in 1665, when the British Royal Society directed that items in its Philosophical Transactions, the world's oldest scientific journal in continuous publication, be reviewed by members of the society prior to publication. However, it was not until the middle of the 20th century that peer review replaced review by an editor as the most common form of refereeing in major scientific and medical journals.

Although peer review is widely used, it is not without its critics. Chelimsky describes three major concerns: questions about efficiency, or the time and effort expended to seek appropriate experts to read a manuscript and render a review; questions about equity or the fairness of the peer review process to authors or applicants; and questions about efficacy, concerning whether peer review provides each field with the best work.

Given that peer review has broad support in science and technology fields, there has been a long history of debate on whether it ensures scholarly merit. A 2002 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that peer review is largely untested and its effects are uncertain. In some cases, peer review may cause negative effects. For example, as David Shatz points out, some heavily cited papers, even some whose authors subsequently won Nobel Prizes for their work, were originally rejected by peer review.