In Referees We Trust?

The origins of the modern peer review system at both scientific journals and funding bodies—and how young peer review as a practice actually is.

In Referees We Trust? investigates the origins of the peer review system, a system that is often considered the essential mechanism that protects the trustworthiness of scientific research. Melinda Baldwin traces the first refereeing systems to journals affiliated with scientific societies in the early nineteenth century and follows refereeing as it spread from Britain to the United States. She finds that the refereeing system was not immediately embraced by all scientific journals; many institutions deliberately eschewed refereeing and were not seen as less reliable because of that choice.

The book shows that the modern link between peer review and scientific legitimacy was forged during the Cold War, as legislators and other government stakeholders began to question the need for scientists’ advice on how to award federal grant money. Scientists argued that if grant money was awarded without their expert opinions—in other words, without review by a grant applicant’s scientific peers—the US government would be violating a core principle of science itself. That argument was so successful that the idea of “peer review” as a cornerstone of science took hold and spread, elevating peer review from an optional process to a system intended to ensure the quality and trustworthiness of all of science.