Keep in mind: The adjectives scholarly, academic and peer reviewed are often used as synonyms. In its strictest sense, peer review is a process that may or may not be applied to a scholarly or academic journal article. Thus, a peer reviewed article is scholarly or academic in nature, but an article that is scholarly or academic in nature may not have undergone peer review. Many scholarly journal articles do undergo peer review, hence the tendency to use the terms interchangeably. In most cases, if a library database tags an article as scholarly or academic, the article is probably also peer reviewed. If you feel the need to double check, you can ask a librarian for help, or see the other suggestions on this page.
To further confuse the matter, certain books and book chapters can be considered scholarly sources, depending upon the author, content and intended audience (here's a scholarly humanities book and a scholarly science book). Peer review, however, is a process only applied to journal articles and is not applied to books and book chapters.
For a given assignment, always check with your professor if you are unsure about the types of outside information sources that are acceptable for use.
By their nature, primary research articles are published in scholarly peer reviewed journals. The library's JEWL Search is one place to locate peer reviewed journal articles. This handout expands on the instructions below.
1. Enter your keywords/topics.
2. On the search results page, use the filters underneath the search bar at the top of the screen to limit your results:
3. Every article in your search results will not necessarily be a primary research article. Read the article abstract and skim the article's section headings to determine if this is a primary research article.
How do you know if an article is from a peer-reviewed academic journal or an academic journal that doesn't include peer-reviewed articles? Two options: (1) search for the journal title in Ulrichsweb database or (2) check the journal publisher's website for a detailed description of the journal.
Search the title of the journal (not the article) and look at the symbols beside the title. If there is a "refereed" symbol 
, then the journal is peer-reviewed. Refereed is a synonym for peer-reviewed.
| Look for one of these icons in the article record: |
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| If you don't see one of those, click this: |
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to find links to the article in another database or to see if the library has the article in print. |
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If the library does not have a copy, you can order it for free through Interlibrary Loan. If you have a citation that did not come from a library database, try using our JEWL Search or Google Scholar, which may provide you with a link to a library subscription offering. |
