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The Scholarly and Peer Review Guide: Scholarly and Peer Review

Finding resources that are scholarly and peer-reviewed in the online databases.

What is Peer Review?

Not all journals of peer reviewed journals. Most journals that are, are scholarly journals. Trade publications and professional journals often are not peer reviewed journals. Peer reviewed journals as setup so that if authors make a submission to a peer reviewed journal, where they want their academic paper to be published, their paper has to be read by a select committee of their peers appointed by the journal to read journal submissions. Sometimes academic journals might do "blind reviews". That means that before a paper is given to a committee of peers, the name and professional connections of the author(s) are removed from the paper. This often allows for a fair evaluation of an academic paper that has been written, and limits peer bias.

When reading submissions to an academic journal, peer reviewers decide whether the academic paper submitted fits the journal in terms of its chosen topic, subject area and tone. They also look at how the study has been conducted, if the study's methodology, analysis and discussion is sound. Finally, they look at the paper's format and length, and if the author has followed the journal submission rules e.g. in terms of writing style and font etc. The peer reviewers also look for spelling and grammar errors and any other problems that might occur. The reviewer's comments are collated and sent to the author(s) who has to make whatever changes and fixes are suggested to their paper before it can be published.

What is a peer-reviewed journal?

Peer reviewed articles are written by scholars. Peer reviewed journals are journals that accept articles only after these have been reviewed by peer reviewers who are specialists in the field in which the journal is publishing articles. All academic journal are NOT peer reviewed. If you are searching for peer reviewed journals then it is important to go to the search box in the online database you are using and find search options that allow you to search for both scholarly and peer reviewed journals at the same time. For further information please see the "Limiting the Databases to Peer Reviewed and Scholarly" tab on this Libguide.

What is peer-review? Video

Peer-Review in 3 minutes: Video

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Danielle O'Barto
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Ottawa University
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Limiting the Databases to Peer-Reviewed and Scholarly

If you are using Ebschost to find full-text articles that are Scholarly and Peer Reviewed, look below the Search Box to find your Search Options boxes.

Find the "Limit your Results" box where you can checkmark the boxes for limiting your search to only Scholarly and Peer Reviewed articles.  See this example below:

Limit your results

  • Full Text
  • References Available
  • Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals
  • Published Date

Year:  – 

·  Year:

·  Publication