Peer-reviewed articles

How do I know if articles are scholarly or peer reviewed?

This video examines articles found in a database search to see whether they are likely scholarly or peer reviewed.

Video transcript

How do I know if articles are scholarly or peer-reviewed?

Here is an example: let’s imagine you are writing an essay about pay equity and women. You perform this keyword search in Academic Search Complete (a large, multi-disciplinary database).

Let’s look at a few articles from the results list and evaluate whether they are scholarly or peer-reviewed. This article from the results list says it’s from a periodical.

The article is very short. It has no citations or reference list. There are no headings or sections. The article is from a trade journal - which is not scholarly: it is written for lawyers, by other lawyers.

Here is another article from the results list. It is only 3 pages long. It is written for a general audience. There are no citations or reference list, no headings or sections, and no author credentials. This is an article from a magazine – which is not scholarly: it is written by a journalist.

Here is another article from the results list. The database states the article is in an Academic Journal and that it’s 22 pages long. We can see here that a university publishes the journal — that’s a good sign! The authors have academic affiliations. There is contact information for one of the authors. If we examine the structure, we can see that the article is divided into sections with headings. The language is academic. There are also tables, graphs, data and charts – although not all scholarly articles have these. We can see that there are references: there’s an extensive bibliography of sources at the end of the article. There are also in-text citations to sources throughout the article. In conclusion, this is an academic, scholarly, peer-reviewed article that relates directly to your assignment topic.

Evaluation of sources is especially important when using Google Scholar or large, multidisciplinary databases like Academic Search Complete.

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