Two Minute Tutorials (or less)
Finding Peer-Reviewed Publications
What Is Peer Review? Peer-review is the process that scholars follow to guarantee a certain level of quality in the articles they produce. Essentially, if someone wants to publish an article in a journal, the article is sent to a number of peers who decide if it can, or cannot be published.
Many times, your instructors will want you to use peerreviewed publications. These can also be called “refereed” or “academic” resources. This tutorial will help you find them.
How to Find peer-reviewed journal articles This is normally not very difficult. The information is often somewhere in the journal itself.
How to Find peer-reviewed journal articles Or, if it’s in a database, you can normally find the information on the page for the entire journal. Discovering this is different in each database. Here’s an example how to do it in Academic Search Premier. You find this article, and want to know if it was peer-reviewed. Click on the name of the article to look at the record.
How to Find peer-reviewed journal articles In the record, you will see lots of information, but look for the name of the journal. In this case, it is labeled as Source: This article was published in Art Bulletin. Click on it.
How to Find peer-reviewed journal articles Now you are on the right page. This page has information about the journal as a whole, and includes at the bottom if it is peer-reviewed or not.
Just because a journal is peer-reviewed does not mean that the information is correct or incorrect, or that something that is not peerreviewed is no good.
The Economist is an excellent source of information but it is not peerreviewed because peer-review takes a lot of time. The Economist must publish its information quickly. But it is still strictly edited, so the information is highly valuable.
Books
This is more difficult especially since so many publishers are bought by other publishers. The best way to determine if a book has been peer-reviewed is in the following way: 1.
If the publisher is a university press, it can be assumed that it has been peerreviewed. If this is not the case, however:
1.
Search Publishers’ Catalogues at: http:// www.lights.ca/publisher/ and you should find the publisher’s website fairly easily.
From here you can see their history. Let’s say you have a book published by Hachette Book Group. You look on the About page and discover that it was created in 2006 when Hachette Livre, a global publishing company based in France, acquired Time Warner Book Group from Time Warner. So, this looks like a worthwhile publisher.
Some of this is not easy. If you need help
Two Minute Tutorials (or less)
Finding Peer-Reviewed Publications See also: Evaluating Materials Go to: List of Two-Minute Tutorials