Peer-reviewed articles are articles that have undergone a rigorous review process. An author submits a manuscript to a journal. Journal reviewers, which are professionals and experts in the same field, evaluate the manuscript and determine whether or not the manuscript’s ideas, procedures, and content are worthy of publication on the basis of accuracy, validity, and rigor. Thus, the author’s peers review and evaluate the value that a manuscript may have on that discipline. In this way, a peer-reviewed article can represent the best research practices in the academic field. Peer-reviewed articles may also be called scholarly or refereed.
Look for these elements in a peer-reviewed article:
- Author's credentials and/or organization affiliation
- An abstract that summarizes the paper's content
- Information on the research methodology (i.e., how was the research performed)
- Results of the study and the author's conclusions
- Footnotes or in-text references to other sources that were used to support this research
- A bibliography
