How Do I Find Peer-Reviewed Articles?

This was a frequent question in the past week. It's a great question. This week we look at how to use library databases to find peer-reviewed literature. 

Photo by Tamara Gak on Unsplash

What is peer review?

Researchers and scholars publish their research findings in academic journals. In order to maintain a high standard of scientific inquiry, academic journals rely on experts to review articles prior to publication.

Peer review is a process by which articles are evaluated by other experts prior to publication. These experts are other scientists and scholars in the same field as the article authors. The experts read and critically assess the article for rigor and scientific merit. Once an article passes through this process, it is published in a journal. Journals that require this process prior to publication are considered peer-reviewed or scholarly.

The benefit of using peer-reviewed literature is knowing that the research methods are of high quality and the data collected is credible. It has been vetted by experts in the same field of study. 

Where do we find peer-reviewed articles?

Peer-reviewed journals allow their publications to be included in academic databases. This allows us to search for peer-reviewed or scholarly articles. These databases are either open to the public or "open access" or behind paywalls and require subscriptions. A library will subscribe to academic databases so that students can have access to scholarly articles. 

Open access databases such as PubMed, PLOS One, and ScienceOpen contain primarily peer-reviewed journals. Use search filters to eliminate editorials, book reviews, and letters. Most of the remaining results will be peer-reviewed articles. If you want to be sure the article appears in a peer-reviewed journal, look up the website of the journal and look for any mention of peer review in their publication process.

Subscription databases such as EBSCOhost's Academic Search Complete, Dentistry & Oral Sciences Source, and CINAHL with Full Text contain peer-reviewed journals among other types of articles. These databases have filters that allow you to eliminate results that are not peer-reviewed. Here is a screenshot of the Dentistry and Oral Sciences Source search page showing the location of the "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals search limiter.  

A nice feature of these databases is that you can confirm the peer review status of the journal by looking up the journal in a publication search. Look for a link to Publications in the top menu and look up the title of the journal. The Publication Details for the journal will tell you if the journal uses a peer review publication process. 

We now have a page on peer review on our Research Help Guide which shows a few more details about finding peer-reviewed articles. 

As always, if you need any help with a research question, please contact the library staff.