What Does “Peer-Reviewed” Mean?
Peer-review is a type of quality control. It means that an article has been reviewed by other scholars or experts in the field (peers) before being published. Other terms for peer-reviewed are “refereed,” “scholarly,” or “academic.”
These peers have reviewed the article for methodological errors, flaws in judgment, potential bias, originality, etc. Only after an article has gone through this rigorous review is it published in a journal with other peer-reviewed articles. In other words, a peer-reviewed article should be of high-quality.
If a journal is peer-reviewed, the articles in it are too. However, editorials, commentary, letters to the editor and book reviews are not peer-reviewed, even if you find them in a peer-reviewed journal. Newspaper or magazine articles can be useful for finding background information during the research process, but they are not peer-reviewed. Society or organization newsletters and blogposts are not peer-reviewed.
Scholarly vs. Popular Journals
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Popular Magazines |
Peer-Reviewed Journal |
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Author |
Articles written by hired reporters, edited by magazine editors. |
Experts/scholars in the field. |
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Article Acceptance Procedure |
Reporters and journalists are hired and paid to write the article. |
Reviewed by other scholars or experts in the field before being published. |
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Content |
General information about current events or popular culture, written in easy to understand language. |
Original research or experimentation. |
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Overall Appearance |
Glossy paper, lots of ads, heavily illustrated. |
Often contains tables, graphs and charts. Few, if any, ads. |
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Examples |
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Search Ulrich's Periodicals Directory
If you're unsure whether an article is peer-reviewed, search for the journal title in Ulrich's Periodicals Directory. A referee jersey icon will appear next to the journal title if it is peer-reviewed. Journals that are peer-reviewed will contain peer-reviewed articles. Exceptions include letters to the editor, opinion pieces, commentaries, etc.
