Contemporary Media & Journalism: What is a Peer Reviewed Publication?

One of the main characteristics of scholarly journals is the process of peer review. Many of our library's journals are peer reviewed. There is no one guide or comprehensive filter to separate the peer reviewed journals from the non peer reviewed ones. The University of Guleph's Library has a guide describing the peer review process and how you can determine whether or not a journal is peer reviewed.

You can do a search for articles in a database, and then to see if they are refereed check Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory; check the "refereed" box under "features". Also, a very small number of the library's journals can be searched by databases which have a filter for "peer reviewed." At the moment, some of the the databases, available from our databases page, have this filter. There is a "peer reviewed" check box to invoke this filter. These database websites have a lot of full text articles in them (which means you can click through to actually read the articles right on the screen) which make them a very quick way to get a hold of peer reviewed articles. However, USING THESE FILTERS IS A SHORTCUT AND YOU NEED TO BE WARNED:

1. Some of our higher level databases (HaPI, Cinahl, PubMed/MEDLINE, etc.) are almost entirely made up of peer reviewed journals, but they lack full text, making the process for getting the articles considerably longer. So, use these filtered databases only if you have to find a few peer reviewed articles.
    
2. Even though a particular journal is peer reviewed, an individual article in that journal may not be. Some article types (news items, editorials, etc.) may not have gone through the peer review process.