Historicising Peer Review. Publishing Procedures in Nineteenth-Century Belgian Medical Societies

The origins of "peer review" are generally situated in the publishing procedures of eighteenth-century learned societies. The Philosophical Transactions, in particular, have been presented as "the first peer-reviewed journal". This paper examines the historical trajectory of editorial peer review, from its eighteenth-century origins to its integration in the twentieth-century specialised scientific press. To this end, it presents a case-study of the publishing procedures of nineteenth-century medical societies in Belgium. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, medical societies adapted the model of the learned society to meet the needs of an expanding group of scientifically interested physicians. Their journals reveal a remarkably open review procedures in which the judgments of submitted studies (including the negative ones) were communicated to a broad medical audience. Following the example of the Bulletin of the French Academy of Medicine, these judgments were included in published meeting reports, a new scientific genre in the early nineteenth century. In the second half of the century, medical societies modified their publishing strategies in reaction to the emergence of specialised medical journals. Medical societies now focused on an audience of general practitioners, an evolution in which the published meeting report lost value. The system of peer review, however, was picked up by the editorial boards of these new specialised journals. From this basis, peer review was gradually transformed into a mechanism of selection and quality control in twentieth-century medicine.status: publishe