Gatekeepers through time: Peer review and the making of nursing knowledge

Peer review is central to how nursing defines, validates, and circulates knowledge, yet its historical role in shaping the discipline's intellectual boundaries has received limited critical examination. This conceptual-historical paper traces the evolution of peer review in nursing across three eras: early professionalization and nursing journal formation (1880s-1950s), the pursuit of scientific legitimacy and evidence hierarchies (1960s-1990s), and the contemporary metric-driven, impact-factor environment (2000s-present). Drawing on frameworks of epistemic injustice, coloniality of knowledge, patterns of knowing, and audit culture, we argue that peer review has functioned as a mechanism of epistemic gatekeeping that has progressively aligned nursing scholarship with ongoing colonization through dominant biomedical and positivist standards in pursuit of professional legitimacy. This alignment has marginalized qualitative, community-based, decolonial, and practice-rooted inquiry while reproducing racialized, classed, and gendered hierarchies across editorial authority, methods, and citation practices. Yet threads of resistance reveal possibilities for change. We propose strategies to expand paradigm-appropriate definitions of rigor, diversify epistemic leadership, resist metric dominance, and embed structural competence and accountability in review practices. Transforming peer review is essential if nursing is to produce knowledge that is equitable, accountable, and responsive to structural conditions shaping health and care.