Archer Library: Film and Video: Peer-Reviewed/Scholarly Materials

Peer Review in 3 Minutes

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

Ulrichsweb
Ulrichsweb is a bibliographic database providing detailed, comprehensive, and authoritative information on serials published throughout the world. It covers all subjects, and includes publications that are published regularly or irregularly and are circulated free of charge or by paid subscription.

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