REL 1313: Ethics: Finding Peer reviewed journals

Introduction

This page explains what a peer-reviewed journal is and how to find them in databases.

Magazines vs Scholarly journals

Image of PowerPoint slide. Title: Scholarly/Peer Reviewed Journals. What: Article written for professionals and scholars in a specific field. Peer reviewed. Identifying features: Long (more than 5 or 6 pages), lack of images, contains charts and diagrams, long bibliography, many authors, authors’ credentials listed, purpose of article is to report results of research. A peer-reviewed article is an article that is published in a journal where scholars (also known as peers) in the same field that the journal is about review the article before publication. Example: Journal of Asian Studies

Image of PowerPoint slide. Title: Why use them? Peer review is a well-accepted indicator of quality scholarship. This means that articles accepted for publication through a peer review process implicitly meet the discipline’s expected standard of expertise.

How do you find Peer-reviewed articles?

Most databases allow you to limit your search to just peer-reviewed articles, as in the example below from an EBSCO database. You just click on the check box in front of Scholarly (Peer-Reviewed) Journals.

Here is how you limit your search results to Peer-Reviewed Journals in Gale journal databases on the results page. Just click on the check box in front of Peer-Reviewed Journals, as is shown below.