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If I understand correctly, only one of Einstein's papers was ever subjected to peer review. He didn't like it. [0]

There are some situations where peer review has led to groupthink. The one that comes to mind is the amyloid hypothesis. [1]

[0] https://theconversation.com/hate-the-peer-review-process-ein...

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio...

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Thanks, I wasn't aware of the level of peer review of physics journals in the early 20th century. Note that Annalen der Physik was publishing 90-95% of submissions, so there was still some review process. I also wonder how much of that had to do with the average quality of a researcher working in physics back then, since physics was still a specialized pursuit of a very small number of people. We have orders of magnitude more people working in science today, so it might not be feasible for journals to publish 90-95% of submissions without a significant drop in quality. I think the solution is for more fields to adopt the model that most of math/CS/physics already follows. Put everything up on preprint servers and allow people to cite preprints. That way the community can accept ideas and build on them regardless of whether a specific paper makes it into published journals.

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