Writing secrets: how to recognize a peer-reviewed article?

When you are tasked with writing an essay you may have to find many peer reviewed papers and journal articles to use as support for your article or as the basis of your literature review. So how can you recognize a peer reviewed article?

  1. A peer reviewed journal article will be found in a highly academic database. A peer reviewed article will not be something contained inside of a generic website page. It will be include of a professional and academic database. That means if you conducted a generic search and it was not contained in an academic and reputable journal then it is probably not a peer reviewed journal article.
  2. A peer reviewed journal article will be a previously published article that is reviewed by other published authors. The purpose of the peer review is to encourage lively debate about certain subjects. When an author finishes a study and produces a case study on it the paper is reviewed by other published authors. It is sort of a lively debate that never ends. Author A publishes their findings after an experiment. Then Author B published slightly different findings. Author A comments on what Author B did searching for either errors or a critique of what they did. Then Author B will comment on the publication of Author C after they produce a paper. This continues forever.
  3. That being said it is quite easy to spot a peer reviewed article because it will say "peer reviewed" or "reviewed by" in the title. It might say "A review of ___" and list the title. It will then have information about the article such as the authors name and a summary followed by a critique. You will see the sections very well laid out in the article.
  4. If you are still somehow unsure of what a peer reviewed article is you can always turn to a librarian and ask them to show you a sample. Seeing a peer reviewed article may help you to better understand what they look like. You can conduct a search using keywords such as "peer reviewed scholarly article" or "peer reviewed article" on the scholarly part of a search engine. All of these techniques can be applied so that you can learn to recognize a peer reviewed article anywhere you might be looking and for any task you might have.