Is This Item Peer-reviewed?

This page gives broad guidelines determining whether an article, news item, or other document is peer-reviewed.

What does "peer-reviewed" mean?

If an article has been peer-reviewed before being published, it means that the article has been read by other people in the same field of study. That is, "peers" of the author--scientist in the same field, for example--have read the article and commented on it. Those reviewers have noted typos and possible errors, but has also given a judgment about whether or not the article should be published by the journal to which it was submitted.

How do I find "peer-reviewed" materials?

• Most of the the research articles in scholarly journals are peer-reviewed. 
  
  
• Some databases will note whether an item is peer-reviewed. For example, databases that we buy from the database vendors CSA, EBSCO, and Wilson allow you to check a box that says "peer-reviewed," or to see which results in your list of results are from peer-reviewed sources. Some of the databases that provide this are Academic Search Premiere, Applied Science and Technology Abstracts, CINAHL, General Science Full Text, PsycINFO, and Sociological Abstracts.

What kinds of materials are *not* peer-reviewed?

• open web pages
• letters to the editor
• editorials
• press releases
• most newspapers, newsletters, and news items in journals
• columns
• book reviews 
• preprints and e-prints
• anything in a popular magazine (e.g., Time, Newsweek, Glamour, Men's Health)
• law review articles

If a piece of information wasn't peer-reviewed, does that mean that I can't trust it at all? 

No, not at all. For example, the preprints and e-prints collected by and submitted to well-known databases such as arXiv (mainly covering physics) and CiteSeer (mainly covering computer science) are trustworthy, as are the databases and web pages produced by trustworthy entities such as the National Library of Medicine, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Cancer Society.

Then how should I evaluate the information and the web pages that I find?

Please look at the guides from the libraries at Virginia Tech and UC Berkeley. These guides will point out the important clues that you should always look for when deciding to depend on a web page for information.

One last thing: open-web pages disappear! Your professor or your readers may not be able to find a reference that you cited because that page from the open web is no longer there. The article "Going, Going, Gone: Lost Internet References" will make you think twice about using open web pages to back up what you're saying.

Librarian:  Sue Vazakas, 410-516-4153, svazakas@jhu.edu
Last revised:  October 8, 2007