“Peer review” is younger than you think. Does that mean it can go away?

Ben Schmidt:

But even if peer review is ancient, “peer review” itself is quite new. I was surprised, a few years ago, in performing anachronism consulting for the show “Masters of Sex,” set in the early 1960s, to see my algorithms reject one character’s suggestion that Masters and Johnson needed to publish in peer reviewed journals as hopelessly anachronistic. But that is indeed the case. Google Ngrams shows only sporadic uses before about 1970; the adjectival form “peer reviewed,” as adhering to scholarship, barely exists before 1980. (As always, you should basically ignore Google Ngrams results from after 2000, but why not include them?)