Answers

"What is a peer reviewed journal?"

In academic research, the words scholarly, peer-reviewed, and refereed are often used interchangeably to describe literature that meets a standard of credibility not found in popular publications. A legitimate research paper should primarily cite scholarly works to reinforce the author's thesis with more trustworthy, unbiased facts and examples.

There are many factors to consider when determining whether a source is scholarly, and we have constructed this Guide to Scholarly and Peer-Reviewed Journals to help you along the way.

"Where do I find this?"

Fortunately, academic databases and McDermott Library's Discover search simplify this aspect of research considerably by featuring a Scholarly or Peer-Reviewed search limiter. This filter is located in the menu to the left of your search results in many interfaces.

Here is an image of the search limiter menu in a Discover search, set up to limit results to articles from peer reviewed journals from the most recent 10 years:

Further, any peer-reviewed article in your Discover results will have a purple icon to confirm this:

Related topics:

How do I find a journal or a specific article?