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BIOL131: General Biology II: Is It Peer-Reviewed?

What is Peer Review?

When an article is peer-reviewed, the article is examined by scholars who are experts on the article's topic.The reviewers check the article for accuracy and determine the signifigance it has to the field of study. Based on their assessment, reviewers can accept a scholar's article for publication in a scholarly journal, return it to the scholar for editing, or reject the article.

How to Tell if Something is Peer-Reviewed

Peer-Reviewed Journals, also known as referreed journals, are all scholarly, but go through the extra process of review as described above.

So how do you know that it is peer-reviewed?  Try the following ways to verify:

  1. Fox Hunt and most databases offer ways to limit to just peer-reviewed journals.  Turn this limit on and if your article stays in the result list then it is peer-reviewed.
  2. Examine the article record, oftentimes it is listed on the page of information about the article.
  3. Click on the name of the journal (not the database name ex: ProQuest, EbscoHost, ScienceDirect, etc,) and look for information about the journal.  Usually in the description of the journal, the publisher will indicate if it is peer-reviewed or not.

What is a Scholarly Journal?--There is a section on what a Peer-Reviewed Journal is

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