Scholarly Review, Old and New

<jats:p> 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. </jats:p>