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What is Peer Review?

Researchers and scholars work on different kinds of projects that they want to share with the scientific and broader community.

• Primary source research projects are reports of an experiment or set of experiments done by the people writing the paper. These papers will have Method and Results section.
• Secondary source research projects are analyses of others' research, often to describe the field's current state or to explain how different projects fit together. Sometimes these papers will also have a Methods and Results section, as the authors can conduct statistics by combining data from other people's experiments.

Once the researchers write up their projects as an article, they will submit that article to a journal. Journals publish collections of articles from a specific field, or on a topic. For example, some journals publish articles on best practices in college education, while others publish the latest cancer research. Selecting the right journal is an important step in the publication process.

 Most respected journals rely on a peer-review process to evaluate the scientific merit of the articles they receive. This involves asking experts in the field to read a draft of the article and give their feedback on it. If the article passes the peer-review process (the reviewers think the experiment was done well and the conclusions are reasonable), then the editors of the journal might select that article for publication.

The peer-review system is not without flaws. The Retraction Watch blog informs the public when articles are retracted (withdrawn from circulation) due to various reasons, including plagiarism, error, and fraud.

This video from the NCSU Libraries quickly and concisely discusses how articles get peer reviewed, and the role of peer review in scholarly research and publication.

Is It Peer-Reviewed?

How can I tell if a particular article is peer-reviewed? Peer-reviewed articles 

• are published in peer-reviewed journals (but see below! Not all articles in peer-reviewed journals were reviewed.)
• often include Method and Results sections.

Even if a journal is considered peer-reviewed, not all articles within that journal are peer-reviewed. Articles that are NOT peer-reviewed include:

• letters to the editor
• news briefs
• editorials
• review articles
• book reviews

These are still valuable sources of information, but they are not peer-reviewed.

How can I tell if the article is peer-reviewed?

1. See the databases page to learn how to restrict your search to only peer-reviewed articles.
    
2. Once you've found a potential article, click on it to view the detailed record. Often, this will contain a field that indicates peer-review.
   • You'll usually be able to read the abstract on this page.
   • Sometimes at the bottom of the page a journal subset field will indicate peer review, double anonymized (formerly called double blind) peer review, or any other variation of peer review.  

Still have questions? Ask a librarian!