Peer Review

Peer review is the practice of having independent experts in a field examine a claimed finding before it is published, checking its method and reasoning rather than taking the author's word for it. Its earliest institutional home is the Royal Society's journal Philosophical Transactions, begun in 1665, which had its Council review submissions before printing them, though single-blind and double-blind review by named external referees in the modern sense developed gradually over the eighteenth through twentieth centuries rather than arriving fully formed. It remains contested: reviewers disagree, bias by reviewer prestige or institution is documented, and it has repeatedly failed to catch fraud, but no replacement mechanism commands comparable trust across the sciences.