How to Find a Peer Review From a Journal
Print media offers you different types of articles to read. For example, popular articles are not articles everyone loves to read. Popular articles, published in magazines and newspapers, are written for a general audience. The writer avoids using specialized terminology and is not an expert on the topics he is writing about. Scholarly journals, also called refereed journals, accept articles submitted by experts and reviewed by experts on the topic. When you search for peer-reviewed articles, you will not find them on the newspaper or magazine stand at your favorite grocery store. You must conduct research to find peer-reviewed journal articles.
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Instructions
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Select the topic you are researching. Narrow your search options. If you are researching a topic for a college course, you may already have the topic.
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Go to a library. A library — especially a college or university library — keeps scholarly journals on its stacks and in a computer database.
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Search a database. Select the database according to your topic. For example, for a social science topic, you may want to search in PsycINFO. You can also look in a general academic, interdisciplinary database like Academic Search Elite. The general databases are not limited to a single discipline.
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Limit the database search. Some databases, such as Academic Search Premier and WilsonWeb, allow you to limit your search to peer-reviewed, scholarly journals or refereed articles.
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Identify the peer-reviewed journal article. Read the article to ensure that it is not a news article. The article should have footnotes or bibliographies. Also, the writer uses specialized terminology related to the topic.
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Tips & Warnings
Databases typically offer full-text articles. Full-text articles allow you to read and print the entire article from the database.
Peer-reviewed articles contain academic, original research. The writer composes the article for a targeted audience that has knowledge about the specialty subject. Also, professional organizations publish scholarly, peer-reviewed articles.
Peer-reviewed articles not in the database include the term full-text and are not available online.You must search library stacks to obtain the print article. Typically, articles are available at the library in current or bound scholarly journals or on microfiche. If the library does not have peer-reviewed articles available, you may be able to request them from another library by using an interlibrary loan.
Do not depend on conducting an online search or using online resources like Google scholarly journals. Searching online may not provide you with scholarly journals or peer-reviewed articles.
References
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