11 Peer Review
Introduction
Peer review is an important step in the publication of scholarly articles. We introduce peer review now so that you know what this term means when we start exploring library search tools next week. We’ll also be doing a small-scale version of peer review as part of our final project for this class.
Peer Review
As we discussed earlier this week, scholarly sources are written by academic experts for other academics to read. Scholars share information in a variety of formats. We’ve covered scholarly books and research articles, but academic journals may also publish other types of content like editorials or book reviews.
Everything published by an academic publisher goes through review by a professional editor. However, research articles often go through an additional process called peer review.
Peer review is the process by which academic journal articles are reviewed by experts before they can be published. Reviewers with experience on the topic evaluate whether the article presents original ideas, uses sound methodology, and comes to reasonable conclusions.
For an introduction to peer review, please watch the video below (run time 4:08):
We will talk more about peer review in Week 4: Source Evaluation. For now, it is just important to know the following:
- The primary goal of peer review is to promote the publication of high-quality, reliable research.
- You may need to seek out peer-reviewed articles for an assignment or, eventually, your own research.
Key Takeaways
- Peer review is when experts review research before publication to make sure it is high quality.
- Despite valid criticisms, peer-reviewed research is still considered the “gold standard” of scholarly publications.
- You may need to find peer-reviewed research for some assignments.
