Music: What are Peer-Reviewed Materials?

• A peer-reviewed journal, sometimes also called refereed, is a journal where the articles are vetted by the article author's peers. In other words, if an educational scholar wants to submit his or her article to a peer-reviewed journal, a group of other educational scholars who review articles for the journal have to agree that it is good/rigorous enough to be included in their journal
• Here are some criteria for telling popular magazines from trade journals and from academic, peer-reviewed journals

You can't always trust an article database on whether or not a particular journal is peer-reviewed. To find out whether it is or not, you can:

a) Search the journal title in the UlrichsWeb database

b) Search the journal title in Google or another search engine

• If the journal isn't in Ulrich's, you can search for its website, which will tell you whether it's peer-reviewed or not
• In Google or another search engine like Bing, type the journal title in double quotation marks so that it's read as a phrase
• E.g., type: "canadian journal of education"
• Usually, there will be writer's guidelines called "Submission guidelines," "Writers' guidelines," or something similar. That's the section where they will frequently tell you whether the journal is peer-reviewed
• The information may also be under the general information on the journal, or under something like "editorial policy"
• Sometimes it will say "blind review" when it's peer-reviewed