“When did peer review start?” does not have a single clean answer, and searchers looking for one usually get an oversimplified story as a result. The honest version is that peer review was not invented on a specific date by a specific person. It emerged gradually, over roughly three centuries, out of scientific societies’ practical need to decide what to publish — and it did not become the near-universal, named, systematic practice familiar today until well into the 20th century. This page traces that gradual formalization, with the genuine points of historical dispute flagged rather than smoothed over.
For how peer review actually works today — the submission-to-decision workflow, what reviewers evaluate, and the identity-disclosure models — see Peer Review: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters and the dictionary entry for peer review. This page focuses specifically on where the practice came from.
Before “peer review” had a name: 17th-century precedents
The earliest widely cited precursor is the Royal Society of London’s Philosophical Transactions, launched in 1665 under Henry Oldenburg, the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as its editor and publisher. Oldenburg is generally credited with instituting the practice of circulating submitted manuscripts to other knowledgeable members for comment before they were printed — the Society’s own council minutes from 1664 record an order that the journal’s contents be “licensed by the Council of this Society, being first revised by some Members of the same.” That is a genuine precedent for expert pre-publication review, but it was informal and editor-driven, not a codified, named process, and it should not be read as “peer review” in the modern procedural sense.
A second, less widely known 17th- and 18th-century precedent comes from Scotland: the Medical Essays and Observations, published from 1731 by the Royal Society of Edinburgh (then the Society for the Improvement of Medical Knowledge), is cited by a number of historians as an early — some argue the earliest — documented system of routing submitted papers to subject-matter members for judgment, with the identity of the reviewing member kept from the author. Which of these two Scottish and English precedents deserves priority is genuinely disputed in the history-of-science literature; both are real, and neither is a clean “first.”
1752: the Royal Society’s Committee of Papers
Most historians treat 1752 as the point where the Royal Society of London moved from one editor’s informal judgment to a collective, institutional review mechanism: the Council formed a “Committee of Papers” charged with deciding, as a body, which submitted papers would appear in Philosophical Transactions. Committee members were given abstracts of the papers under consideration and were expected to reach a decision without extended discussion. This is real institutional review — but it was a committee reading summaries and voting, not individual named referees producing detailed written reports on a manuscript’s methods, which is closer to what “peer review” means today.
1831–1832: independent written referee reports
The step historians most often point to as the origin of the modern referee report is 1831–1832. Following a suggestion from the polymath William Whewell in 1831, the Royal Society experimented briefly with jointly authored assessments before moving, from 1832 onward, to commissioning independently written reports from individual referees on specific papers — rather than a committee voting on a summary. This is the closest single moment in the historical record to “peer review as we would recognize it,” though it applied to one learned society’s flagship journal, not to scholarly publishing broadly, and took decades more to spread.
19th and early 20th century: gradual, uneven spread
Through the 19th century, refereeing became more systematic at the Royal Society specifically — procedures were reinforced and extended during the long editorial tenure of the mathematician George Gabriel Stokes, with papers increasingly routed to a small standing group of specialist reviewers rather than being judged ad hoc. But this systemization was slow and uneven across the wider scholarly landscape: most journals and societies through the 19th and into the early 20th century still relied primarily on an editor’s own judgment, without a formalized external-referee requirement. There was no industry-wide norm yet — refereeing existed at particular institutions well before it existed everywhere.
Mid-20th century: peer review becomes the norm — and gets its name
The transformation into today’s near-universal, named practice is largely a mid-20th-century development, not a 17th- or 18th-century one. Several forces converged after the Second World War: an explosion in the volume of published research, the professionalization and rapid growth of specific academic disciplines, the rise of federal research funding requiring its own vetting mechanism (the U.S. National Institutes of Health formalized external expert review of grant applications through study sections beginning in the 1940s), and a large increase in the number of scientific journals competing on credibility. Historians of science who have studied the Royal Society’s own records in detail — including a widely cited history titled, tellingly, “The Royal Society and the Prehistory of Peer Review, 1665–1965” — treat even 1965 as still part of peer review’s prehistory rather than its mature form, underscoring how recent the fully systematic, everywhere-expected version of the practice actually is. The term “peer review” itself only entered common usage across science and publishing in the 1960s and 1970s; before that, “refereeing” was the more usual word for the practice at journals that had it at all.
By the second half of the 20th century, external expert review before publication had gone from a practice some prestigious societies and journals used to a baseline expectation across most of scholarly publishing — the shift this page is really describing when it talks about peer review’s “history.”
Late 20th and 21st century: identity models, scrutiny, and reform
Once peer review became the default, it also became something to formalize, study, and critique in its own right. Single-anonymized and double-anonymized identity-disclosure models were adopted at different journals through the 20th century as ways of managing bias; more recently, open peer review (publishing reviewer identities and sometimes the reports themselves) has emerged as an alternative — see Single-anonymized vs. double-anonymized vs. open peer review for how these models differ in practice today. Standards work has also caught up with the practice’s maturity: ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023 now formalizes shared terminology for describing these different models — see the dictionary entry for ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023 peer review terminology. Peer review’s real, documented limitations — reviewer bias, inconsistency between reviewers, and the fact that it checks plausibility rather than reproducibility — have also been studied and debated extensively; CASRAI’s Peer Review: Pros and Cons guide covers that evidence in detail and is not repeated here.
So who “created” peer review — and when did it start?
Given the record above, both halves of that question resist a single clean answer:
- There is no single inventor. Henry Oldenburg is the closest thing to a named originator of the underlying idea — routing manuscripts to knowledgeable readers before publishing them — through his editorship of Philosophical Transactions from 1665. But he did not create “peer review” as a codified process; he ran an informal editorial practice that later institutions built on, redesigned, and eventually turned into something much more systematic.
- There is no single start date. 1665 (Oldenburg’s Philosophical Transactions), 1731 (the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Medical Essays and Observations), 1752 (the Royal Society’s Committee of Papers), and 1832 (the move to independent written referee reports) are all defensible answers depending on exactly what you mean by “peer review” — an editor consulting colleagues, a committee voting on submissions, or a named individual producing a written referee report. If the question means “when did peer review become the standard, expected practice across scholarly publishing generally” rather than “when did the first precursor appear at one society,” the honest answer is the mid-20th century, not the 17th.
Any source that gives a single tidy date and a single named inventor is simplifying a genuinely contested, multi-institution, multi-century process — useful as a soundbite, but not an accurate history.
Common questions
When did peer review start?
There is no single start date. Early precedents at the Royal Society of London (1665) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1731) involved routing manuscripts to knowledgeable readers before publication; the Royal Society’s Committee of Papers (1752) added collective institutional review; and independently written referee reports from named individuals — the closest match to today’s process — date from 1832. Peer review did not become the near-universal, standard practice across scholarly publishing until the mid-20th century.
Who created the peer review system?
No single person created it. Henry Oldenburg, editing the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions from 1665, is the most commonly cited early figure for routing submissions to expert readers before publication, but that was an informal editorial practice, not a codified system. The more procedural building blocks — a committee reviewing submissions collectively, then individual named referees writing independent reports — were developed later, primarily at the Royal Society of London through the 18th and 19th centuries, and the practice only spread into a broadly expected scholarly norm across disciplines in the 20th century.
Is Henry Oldenburg the “father of peer review”?
He is often described that way informally, and there is a real basis for it: he is the earliest well-documented figure to systematically route submitted manuscripts to expert readers before publishing them, as editor of Philosophical Transactions from 1665. But historians of science generally treat this as a precedent and precursor rather than the invention of peer review in its modern form, since Oldenburg’s practice was informal, editor-driven, and centuries removed from anything resembling a standardized process.
What is the oldest peer-reviewed journal?
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, first published in 1665, is widely described as the oldest continuously published scientific journal and the earliest to practice a form of expert pre-publication review, though — as above — that early review was informal rather than a codified referee system.
When did peer review become mandatory or standard practice?
There is no single date, but historians generally place the shift from “practiced by some prestigious societies” to “the broadly expected norm across scholarly publishing” in the mid-20th century, driven by the postwar growth in research volume, the professionalization of academic disciplines, the rise of formal grant peer review at major funders, and rapid growth in the number of scientific journals. The word “peer review” itself only became common usage in the 1960s and 1970s.
This page traces the historical origins of peer review. For how the process works today — submission through decision, what reviewers evaluate, and the identity-disclosure models — see Peer Review: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters. For the documented strengths and limitations of the practice, see Peer Review: Pros and Cons. For CASRAI’s broader publishing-integrity work, see the Scholarly Publishing cluster.
