Peer review as conflict

Baldwin replies: Yves Gingras is right that we ought to distinguish the modern peer-review system from the more general idea of having colleagues give opinions about a book or paper. Because my focus was on tracing the origins of the former, I do think it was legitimate to highlight William Whewell’s innovation. However, perhaps it would have been better, and more precise, to say that Whewell was “arguably the inventor of systematic refereeing.”

The term “peer review”—itself a creation of the 20th century—is so weighted with modern connotations that I think historians must be cautious when bestowing it on practices from the past. I agree with Alex Csiszar that the internal approval practices of 17th- and 18th-century scientific societies were significantly different in both form and purpose from modern refereeing, in part due to the dramatic changes in scientific publishing that took place in the 17th through 19th centuries.

Gathering such a wide range of practices under the umbrella of “peer review” seems misleading to me, and it risks creating the false impression that the refereeing system has been a consistent part of science since the Scientific Revolution. My hope, in the article, was to show that the story is much more complicated.

I regret not mentioning Lewis Pyenson’s excellent article on Planck’s work at the Annalen der Physik, and I recommend it to Physics Today readers.

For Vitaly Matsarski’s question , I consulted a handful of fellow historians but was unable to confirm the story about Wolfgang Pauli. I would welcome further correspondence on the subject.

Finally, Peter Williams’s letter is not the only one we received that expressed frustration with the current workings of the peer-review system. As historians work to write a more complete and nuanced history of peer review, one hope I have is that past changes in refereeing practices might shed light on how the process can change in the future to better serve the scientific community.