The blog indicates this quite clearly and is speaking of only the formal, modern and monetized usage of it. Science itself is basically useless without some type of peer review in whatever form.
> But even if peer review is ancient, "peer review" itself is quite new.
Google charts about the history of usage of a particular grouping of terms is not definitive evidence about the history of the underlying activity named by that phrase. Peer review is indeed ancient and fundamental to science and scientific progress. It just may not have been talked about as broadly or referred to under different names before then. It's hard to draw more than linguistic trivia out of that. It's especially bad to make policy suggestions based on that.
Also, the sharp discontinuity in 1970-1980 is suspiciously close to the wide-scale deployment of computers. Probably has a lot more to do with data-availability biases in the corpus used by Google to construct these ngrams data sets from the transition to digital in industry and publishing.
I'm entirely unfamiliar with the work you mentioned. So, I'm going to use just your description of events and work with that.
I'd say that their work was currently under review. After people have reviewed it and written about it, I'd say it was peer reviewed. Once it had been heavily reviewed, I'd probably say it had been formally peer reviewed.
Had it gone through a journal, I'd simply say it was reviewed prior to publication. After publication would be where I'd call it peer reviewed, after it has been published and commented on. Pre-publication review isn't very rigorous. I really don't put much emphasis on that.
To me, peer review happens post publication. Formal peer review would be when there is enough interest for people to make a concerted effort to replicate and dig deep into the findings to seek flaws. General Relativity would be formally peer reviewed. The paper you mention would be undergoing peer review.
I am not asserting that my thinking is correct. I am mentioning this because I see a difference and I think your use of 'currently' may be very important in understanding this.
In 1970, I would attend a reputable prep school. I would not complete my doctorate until 1991.
So, I suspect you're onto something with your use of 'currently.' If I understand your comment about the proof of the Poincare Theorem correctly, I'd say that it is (likely) being currently peer reviewed.
To try to sum this word salad up, I don't see prepublication review as peer review in the scientific sense. To my mind, that happens after publication and with varied levels of formality.
So, I suspect you're onto something when you mention current usage. Sorry for the novella and rambling nature of my post.
There is a weak connection between being in a "peer-reviewed journal", having undergone sufficient peer review (in the classical sense), and possibly the irony is that the connection is has a negative correlation with profile at the high end. (it's probably positively correlated at the low end).
- critical feedback on papers
- hypermonetization (and deleterious siloing) of works often produced with government grants, leading to primarily academics only having ready access to papers, whom don’t see the subscription costs as a burden to them.
- disseminating only papers meeting a threshold to maintain quality of the journal
Maybe scientists and academics should seek to create and use equivalent quality peer / committee adversalism but publish in open forum that operates based on donations.
Academia seems currently over-commercialised: industry getting cheap labor, undergrads going into debt and journals, law libraries and textbook companies making a killing by locking up knowledge behind a paywall. Research papers and case law should be available to the most people as possible for little or no cost.
Without being forced like this, many deadbeat fake journals would die and places like arxiv would flourish.
This is ignoring Eastern science intentionally.
They searched for 'peer review.'
I don't see any indication that they searched in other languages, what those phrases might be, and how they accounted for that.
Well, that and it looks like they are conflating two ideas. They appear to be speaking about more modern journals and ignoring that philosophers shared and published their work, sought students, and held their findings up for scrutiny.
So, not just the phrase part that you mention, but also the language used may impact this. I have no idea how to say peer review in either French or Latin and I am a scientist.