‘Dirty work’, but someone has to do it: Howard P. Robertson and the refereeing practices of Physical Review in the 1930s

Abstract

In the 1930s the mathematical physicist Howard P. Robertson was the main referee of the journal Physical Review for papers concerning general relativity and related subjects. The rich correspondence between Robertson and the editors of the journal enables a historical investigation of the refereeing process of Physical Review at the time that it was becoming one of the most influential physics periodicals in the world. By focusing on this case study, the paper investigates two complementary aspects of the evolution of the refereeing process: first, the historical evolution of the refereeing practices in connection with broader contextual changes, and second, the attempts to define the activity of the referee, including the epistemic virtues required and the journal's functions according to the participants' categories. By exploring the tension between Robertson's idealized picture about how the referee should behave and the desire to promote his intellectual agenda, I show that the evaluation criteria that Robertson employed were contextually dependent and I argue that, in the 1930s, through his reports the referee had an enormous power in defining what direction future research should take.

Authorship in top-ranked mathematical and physical journals: Role of gender on self-perceptions and bibliographic evidence

“…Peer review in physics is a relatively modern practice. Originally, traditional authoritative German journals such as Annalen der Physik did not seek external referees and published based on the sole opinion of an identifiable editor instead (Lalli, 2016). Peer review became standard within the English-speaking world around the mid-20th century and it was only towards the late 20th century that it "came to be seen as a process central to scientific practice" (Baldwin, 2018).…”

Did You Ask for Citations? An Insight into Preprint Citations en route to Open Science

“…In other words, they never added the "preprint" word in the reference, as required by certain research funding agencies, such as the aforementioned National Institutes of Health, and by certain journals. Scholars in physics know, for instance, that reputed journals such as Physical Review, until 1960, used peer review for only half of the papers received, and even in that case, peer review consisted of the editor asking one referee an opinion on a manuscript for which the editor needed advice [40]. From Krebs' 1937 work on the citric acid cycle rejected by Nature and published in Experientia, to Ernst's 1966 work on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy rejected twice by the Journal of Chemical Physics to be finally published in the Review of Scientific Instruments, through Mullis' discovery of the polymerase chain reaction rejected by Science and published in Methods in Enzymology, the fact that several discoveries leading to major scientific progress (and to Noble Prizes) were actually rejected by peer reviewed journals shows evidence that the peer review system has significantly delayed scientific progress, and perhaps also suppressed it [41].…”

Did you Ask for Citations? An Insight into Preprint Citations en route to Open Science

“…In other words, they never added the "preprint" word in the reference as required by certain research funding agencies and by certain journals. Scholars in physics know for instance that reputed journals such as Physical Review until 1960 used peer review only for half of the papers received, and even in that case peer review consisted in the editor asking to one referee an opinion on a manuscript for which the editor needed advice [40]. From Krebs' 1937 work on the citric acid cycle rejected by Nature and published in Experientia, to Ernst's 1966 work on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy rejected twice by the Journal of Chemical Physics to be finally published in the Review of Scientific Instruments, up to Mullis' polymerase chain reaction discovery rejected by Science and published in Methods in Enzymology, the fact that several discoveries leading to major scientific progress (and to Noble Prizes) were actually rejected shows evidence that the peer review system has significantly delayed scientific progress and perhaps also suppressed it [41].…”