This is partly a question about identifying sources, as the peer review process is a characteristic of scholarly (or academic) journal articles. Research articles published in scholarly journals are usually peer reviewed. The only items published in a scholarly journal that are not going to have gone through peer review will be letters to the editor, editorials, book reviews, and the like.
However, on occasion you will also come across a scholarly journal that does not use peer review, or you might also want to make sure about the peer review status of a publication. One good method is to check the publication information in Library databases. For example, ProQuest includes publication details for every journal, magazine and newspaper in its collection.
ProQuest gives you a descriptor to help identify source type, as well as links to more information about the publications.
The Library search bar will show you if an article result is peer-reviewed. Note also that you can use the "peer review" filter to narrow just to that kind of article.
Type of information |
Where foundExamples |
Who writes it |
What they do |
Why they do it(in addition to it being their job) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
SCHOLARLY/
|
Scholarly journals Nature Journal of Wildlife Diseases Conference proceedings International Wolf Symposium 2022 Scholarly books Wolves on the Hunt (Mech, et al. 2015) |
Researchers at academic institutions
Corporate research and development departments
Government agency researchers |
Original experiments
Reviews of the field |
To inform those in their (sometimes very narrow) field
Academic promotion |
TRADE/
|
Trade journals/magazines Forest Machine Magazine Forestry Journal |
Professional journalists working for trade associations
Practitioners (those who do the job) |
News, trends and current practices in a field or profession |
To inform those on the job |
CURRENT EVENTS & FEATURES
|
Newspapers New York Times (Wolves topic) Magazines National Geographic |
Professional journalists
Opinion/editorial writers
Feature writers |
Current events
Opinion pieces |
To inform the general public |
