Library Services
Peer Reviewed Journals
The
researcher's task is to locate the relevant, credible literature on
a topic, including the most up-to-date publications. Researchers use
bibliographic databases and other
methods to identify these publications. Much of the
scholarly literature is published in peer-reviewed sources,
e.g. journal articles or conference proceedings.
What is the difference
between a periodical, a journal, and a peer-reviewed
journal?
A periodical is any publication issued
at regular intervals. Periodicals contain individual
articles written by various authors. Some examples
include the News-Press, People Magazine, Consumer Reports, or scholarly journals, such as
the New England Journal of Medicine.
A journal is a type of periodical. Journals often contain
scholarly articles written by experts and are documented
with citations and bibliographies (or reference lists).
A peer-reviewed journal is a special type of
journal. Peer reviewed (or refereed) journals have been
reviewed by a panel of subject experts. These peer
reviewers scrutinize articles for significance,
relevance, sound research design, accurate presentation,
and clarity before they are accepted for publication. Usually
the process is a blind review, that is, the author's
name is not on the manuscript when it is reviewed and
the author and the reviewers do not know each other's
identities.
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peer reviewers scrutinize research reports for significance,
relevance, sound research design, accurate presentation, clarity,
etc. Refereed journals are considered the most respected
journals and researchers attempt to have their works published in
them. |
Identifying peer reviewed journals through FGCU resources
Many bibliographic databases provide the feature that allows searches to be limited to
peer-reviewed journals.
(Sometimes this feature is only found on the Advanced Search page
of a database.) Look for a limit box to check for peer-reviewed or refereed. Resulting citations will be from only the peer-reviewed sources.
Ebsco Databases: CINAHL
Proquest Databases
In some other databases,
a search must be conducted first and then the peer-reviewed articles
can be viewed by selecting a tab.
Cambridge Scientific
Abstracts (CSA ) databases
Not
all databases provide this limit feature. Also, if a
database only refers to articles as "scholarly" but you are required
to find peer-reviewed articles, you could check the journal's
title in the electronic Ulrich's
Periodical Directory to be certain. (Ulrich's can be
accessed through Databases from http://library.fgcu.edu).
 
This periodical is NOT refereed, i.e. not peer-reviewed
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