Peer-reviewed publications (sometimes called scholarly, academic, or refereed) have gone through a review process by experts in the field before being published. Library databases are good places to locate peer-reviewed articles, though not all sources found in those resources are peer-reviewed.
These strategies can help you determine if an article is peer-reviewed.
Learn more about the journal your article was published in.
- If you found the article in a database:
- there may be an icon on the left side of the source description that indicates the source type (e.g., scholarly article, magazine article, scholarly book). Peer-reviewed articles articles are usually published in scholarly journals and sometimes in scholarly books.
- clicking on the journal title may give you more information about the journal and whether it is is peer-reviewed.
- Google the title of the journal and locate the publisher's website for the journal. Then look for an editorial policy page or a page for authors. This page should also indicate whether articles go through a peer review process.
- WARNING: Peer-reviewed journals publish some articles that are not peer-reviewed. For example, book reviews, theatre reviews, obituaries, and editorials are published in peer-reviewed journals but the individual article does not go through the peer-review process. You need to look at the article in the peer-reviewed journal and determine if it is an opinion-based article (like a review) or if it is a research-based article. A peer-reviewed article should be longer than just a couple of pages and should include a bibliography.
In many databases you can limit your search to only peer-reviewed articles.
- Look for a checkbox that limits a search to scholarly (peer-reviewed) articles (either on the initial search page or on the results page),
- Search in a database or journal that only contains peer-reviewed articles. (Read about the database or journal to identify the nature of its publications.)
