Abstract:There is a prevalent myth, even in scholarly literature, that peer review was born, fully formed, with the advent of the first scientific journals in the seventeenth century. Recent work has shown this to be false. Many of the practices we call peer review are much newer—as new as the second half of the twentieth century. Some essential elements of peer review, however, are much older than the seventeenth century—a fact that has been neglected, both by those who have propagated the myth and also by those who have more recently sought to dispel it. This paper provides three examples of scholarly review from history. The first is an example of editorial review in ancient Rome. The second is an example of post-publication peer review involving scholia, beginning in the fourth century. The third is an example of pre-publication review by censors in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. I join with those authors who seek to bust the myth about the origins of scholarly review but do so by extending their work in the opposite direction chronologically. What we now give the name peer review is really a group of things that has evolved over time. If we want to learn from the history of scholarly review, then we should take a broader and longer view.

中文翻译：

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学术评论，新旧

摘要：即使在学术文献中，也有一个普遍的神话，即随着 17 世纪第一批科学期刊的出现，同行评审诞生并完全成型。最近的工作表明这是错误的。我们称之为同行评审的许多做法都比较新——就像 20 世纪下半叶一样新。然而，同行评审的一些基本要素比 17 世纪要古老得多——这一事实一直被那些传播神话的人和最近试图消除它的人所忽视。本文提供了三个历史学评论的例子。第一个是古罗马编辑评论的例子。第二个是从四世纪开始的涉及 scholia 的出版后同行评审的例子。第三个例子是 16 至 18 世纪审查员对出版前的审查。我加入了那些试图打破关于学术评论起源的神话但通过按时间顺序向相反方向扩展他们的工作的作者。我们现在所称的同行评审实际上是一组随着时间的推移而演变的事物。如果我们想从学术评论的历史中学习，那么我们应该采取更广泛和更长远的观点。