ENGL 322: Black Women Writers

What does it mean for an article to be peer-reviewed?

When a researcher submits an article to a scholarly journal, a journal editor does a first pass to see if the article looks decent. Then they usually remove the name of the author and send it out to a few other experts in the field to see what they think of the article. The experts send back feedback on the article, and the journal editor decides based on that feedback whether to publish the article, or ask for revisions from the author, or deny it outright. This process is called peer-review. (However, peer-review is not foolproof: sometimes those experts miss mistakes or fraud.)

Most academic journals use the peer-review process, but some academic journals don't, and sometimes journals only use peer-review it for certain types of articles (empirical research studies, for example) but not others (commentaries or book reviews, for example).

How can I tell if an article has been peer-reviewed?

• One shortcut is to look for an academic journal label in whatever database you're using. If your article is reporting on the authors' original research and was published in an academic journal, it was probably peer-reviewed. However, the databases sometimes make mistakes with their labels, and sometimes academic journals don't use peer-review, so it's good to double-check.
• How to double-check:
  • Look up the journal in a database called Ulrich's. If it has a referee symbol, that means the article was peer-reviewed.
  • Or look up the journal's website and seeing what they say about peer review in their guidelines for authors. (Here's an example.)

Watch this 3-minute video for more on peer review: