Peer review

In his overview of the history of the editorial peer review, Drummond Rennie points out that the idea of checking the quality of a scientific or scholarly report with a number of anonymous knowledgable peers dates back to 1731.

During the nineteenth century, many editors did not belive in the effectivity of peer review, and it was not institutionalised in the majority of jounals until the decades after World War II (Rennie, 4)