Peer-reviewed articles, also known as scholarly or refereed articles, are:
- Are written by experts in the field
- Are written for other researchers/scholars
- Are reviewed by the scholar's peers to determine whether they are high-quality pieces of work
- Use terms and language that are discipline-specific
- Usually include in-text citations and a bibliography of cited sources
- May include graphs, charts, etc., related to the topic
- Are published by a professional organization or society, university, research center, or scholarly press
Strategies for finding peer-reviewed articles
- Use a library database and limit your search to only peer-reviewed articles. Many of the databases are limited to scholarly publications OR allow you to limit your search to peer-reviewed articles.
- Search Articles+ for peer-reviewed articles
Learn if a journal is peer-reviewed
- Some databases allow you to click on the journal title to get more information about it.
- Or check the journal's website to see whether or not the journal uses a peer-review process in its publishing practices.