The biochemist Dorothy Hodgkin wrote a highly cursory peer review of Crick and Watson’s paper on DNA. | Photo: Daily Herald Archive / Getty Images

The first-ever peer reviews were introduced some 200 years ago by the journal Philosophical Transactions, published by the Royal Society in the United Kingdom. It has now made public 1,600 historical peer reviews from its archive for the years 1949 to 1954. One of them was written by the British biochemist Dorothy Hodgkin in the year 1953 about the manuscript by Francis Crick and James Watson in which they described the structure of DNA. According to an article now published in Nature, Hodgkin kept her review very brief – just 50 words in length – and her only requirement to the authors was that they should improve their photos because “the reflection of the chairs in the perspex rod … is very confusing to the eye”.

Before peer reviewing was standardised in the 1970s, scientists sometimes wrote up to 24 pages for a review, or descended into obvious prejudice, offering comments such as: “Knowing the author, I have confidence that the analysis is correct”. Or: “I was prepared to find that his new paper was rubbish; and it turned out to be rubbish of so rank a character that no competent person could possibly take any other view of it”.